Lyse Doucet for The Finest Hotel in Kabul

Lyse Doucet on The Finest Hotel in Kabul

As the BBC's Chief International Correspondent, Lyse Doucet has led BBC coverage of events ranging from the Arab Spring to the Sudanese Civil War. She first arrived at the Kabul Inter-Continental Hotel as a Junior BBC reporter on Christmas Day 1988, the day after her 30th birthday. She still visits whenever she is in Afghanistan, counting many of its staff and fellow guests her close friends. Join Lyse as she, for the first time, tells their stories, which are at the same time a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.

In 1969, the luxury Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul opened its doors: a glistening white box, high on a hill, that reflected Afghanistan's hopes of becoming a modern country, connected to the world.

Lyse Doucet - now the BBC's Chief International Correspondent, then a young reporter on her inaugural trip to Afghanistan - first checked into the Inter-Continental in 1988. In the decades since, she has witnessed a Soviet evacuation, a devastating civil war, the US invasion, and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban, all from within its increasingly battered walls. The Inter-Con has never closed its doors.

Now, she weaves together the experiences of the Afghans who have kept the hotel running to craft a richly immersive history of their country. It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel's 1970s glory days - an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the 'Paris of Central Asia'. Of Abida, who became the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-somethings who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy - only to see the Taliban come roaring back in 2021.

Lyse Doucet is the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, covering events world-wide, but particularly those in and affecting the Middle East and Asia. She is also a senior presenter, anchoring programmes from the field and the studio for Radio 4, BBC World and the World Service.