Plot: I can’t really summarise the plot because of how many stories run into each other and involve the same characters this makes any summary a little bit pointless. However a really short introduction to the narrative is that a traveler arrives in Cairo only to be taken in by this unknowable fo...
This book provided the title for a Luke Haines B-side, so I thought I'd be better off reading it than not. Actually, it's an entertaining romp through the fag end of counter culture with loads of drugs, sex and satanism which is by turn both horrifying and hilarious.Irwin has drilled down on the ...
The publication of Edward Said's hugely influential Orientalism in 1981 called into question the entire history of the Western study of Islamic culture. Said's book condemned his scholarly tradition as an institution that presented inaccurate and demeaning representations of Islamic peoples, and ...
This is the sort of slim, unserious novella that a charitable critic might call a jeu d'esprit and a less charitable one a complete waste of time. The style has been aptly summarised by a previous reviewer as ‘Orientalist porn’, and sure enough the whole thing feels like an extended riff on a Jea...
The narrator of this short novel is very intellectual and very well-read. I can't help relating to that (although I'm not familiar with some of the topics discussed, particularly semiotics). Her head is full of interesting ideas, drawing from anthropology, art history, evolutionary theory, the me...
If it is history we want, then it is a history of conflict. And the conflict begins with the abduction of a girl, or with the sacrifice of a girl. And the one is continually becoming the other. It was the ‘merchant wolves’, arriving by ship from Phoenicia, who carried off the tauropárthenos from ...
