Tunisian delights for your album

Tunisia can boast of some well-preserved archaeological monuments; it exports deliciously caramel flavoured dates and figs to British supermarkets; and the country enjoys wide renown for its superb couscous. But what do we know of its social and political fronts? With little British media coverage to enlighten us, we may be left thinking that the nation is antiquated or that its rulers lack the progressive outlook of more modern states.

Such barely informed background knowledge skewed my first encounter with Tunisian stamps. I felt remarkably disconcerted as I leafed the pages of a Stanley Gibbons 1966 Part Three catalogue (America, Asia, Africa), picked up in a charity