Martin Rose

Apart from a surfeit of education and short careers in academic publishing and banking, Martin Rose has spent most of his working life at the British Council from 1998 to 2016, serving in Baghdad, Rome, Brussels, Ottawa and Rabat; and still acts as a consultant and adviser to the Council on Cultural Relations, and North Africa. Highlights of his career include an arts-science climate change voyage in a Russian polar vessel to Greenland and Baffin Island, the establishment of Counterpoint, a Cultural Relations think-tank, and the founding of the Anglo-Italian Pontignano conference, now in its 25^th year.

Martin has published on cultural relations, including Mutuality,Trust and Cultural Relations (2004). More recent work includes Immunizing the Mind: How Can Education Reform Contribute to Combatting Violent extremism? (2015), There and Back By Candle-light: Two Years in Baghdad 1988-90 (2016) and A Morocco Anthology: Travel Writing Through the Centuries (2018), as well as much on education, particularly in North Africa. He is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and a Visiting Fellow of the Alwaleed bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge University. He blogs as Mercurius Maghrebensis, lives with his long-suffering wife near Saffron Walden and has four children.