Book Reviews

This elegantly argued, amusing and acute book has been put together, in the end, for a single overdue purpose: to piss all over Edward W. Said’s ludicrous 1978 polemical work, Orientalism. It may look, for most of the journey, like a scrupulous history of the academic study of Arabic cultures, and the steady growth in understanding, as well as some deft character sketches of the necessarily rather eccentric figures in the field. Don’t be misled: Robert Irwin has Said perpetually in his sights. It is quite incredible to conceive the influence Said’s Orientalism has had, within and outside academia. Said’s point was not just that the ‘orientalist’ styles of European

Of the making of books about Churchill there seems to be no end. His own output was large, and largely self-centred. We already have an official life in eight volumes, with several volumes of supplementary papers, a number of single-volume lives, long and short, books by supporters, books by opponents, books by those interested in Churchill’s attachment to their own special subject, books by his personal attendants, books by those who never saw him. Here are two more: a study by a notable historian, who has applied his scholarship to one important corner of Churchill’s life as an imperial statesman, and one by a cousin, who has written a lavish

In 1966, a proud Tom Stoppard went to Foyles’, where to his delighted surprise 12 copies of his first novel were on display. Two weeks later, he checked up on how many had been sold: there were now 13, which led him to the paranoid conclusion that ‘people were leaving my book at bookshops’. Nearly 40 years later, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon is still Stoppard’s only novel and its rank in his complete works is low. Published almost concurrently with the first airing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Edinburgh festival, it is a piece that belongs to the earliest period of embryonic Stoppard: lots of clever

Bernard-Henri Lévy is possessed of a large fortune, great intelligence and film-star good looks (if now a little ageing). He therefore had the wherewithal to go through life like a hot knife through butter, but yet has chosen many times to expose himself to great danger in the continuing wars of torrid zones. Why? In this book, he reprints his reportage from five lengthy, indeed seemingly eternal, civil conflicts — Angola, Burundi, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Sudan — and then appends philosophical reflections as footnotes to what he wrote. These footnotes form two thirds of the book. The author suffers from one of the besetting sins of French intellectuals, a tendency

Although it was set up as a contest between a flagrant outsider and a more traditional intimist there was little doubt that Michel Houellebecq would lose out in the Goncourt stakes. His sulphurous vision and unapologetic rule-breaking were too much for the reading public, not to mention the Goncourt judges, who took little pleasure in his grand design in what amounts to a memento mori for our present civilisation and his unanswered plea for a future that would promise some relief from our various discontents. Instead the Goncourt went to Fran