Nivriti Butalia

Enjoy, Create, Win, Savour — just some of the motivational verbs printed large on the picture-postcard-like hoardings that form the boundary line where work has begun on the ambitious multi-billion dirham Mohammed Bin Rashid City.

A joke among people from emerging economies goes like this: given the power cuts, every hour in my country is earth hour.

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Kindergarten teacher Kirsten Burns turns her nose up at the most expensive necklace in the world: “I would never wear it,” she says. “It’s not my style”.

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Heil is Arabic for cardamom. And the smell of heil escaping from the saffron-infused Arabic coffee poured into the egg-holder-size cup, without any handles, is what hits first.

DUBAI — Heil is Arabic for cardamom. And the smell of heil escaping from the saffron-infused Arabic coffee poured into the egg-holder-size cup, without any handles, is what hits first.

Simon Armitage leaves some things to the last minute. He turns up late for an interview with Khaleej Times. It slipped his mind. He apologises. I tell him it’s alright. And it really is because something in the way he comes across makes it impossible to hold a grudge. Maybe it’s the kind eyes, maybe it’s the floppy hair. Either way, the tardiness is forgiven.

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Simon Armitage recited a poem on aviation as an Emirates Airbus ( A-380, as pointed out by Paul Blezard, host for the evening and introducer of the poets) flew across the sky, over the desert camp near Al Aweer where half a dozen buses and SUVs shipped over a hundred-strong crowd that had paid to listen to poetry under the stars.

Panel discusses the state of the Arabic language today

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‘All things in life are governed by the law of cycles’, wrote Booker prize winner Ben Okri, in A Time For New Dreams.

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Jodi Picoult, known to tackle plain truths in her books, goes through the looking glass in Between the Lines, with co-author Samantha Van Leer