Dune by Frank Herbert has been, and still is, an inspiration to me. That it should still be read by so many people—more than fifty years after its publication—is a testament to its greatness. I would suggest that a major factor underlying this success is how skilfully Herbert plundered history. He did not, as so many writers do, merely break European Medieval history into a handful of pieces and reassemble them to make his story—instead …
In an ironic throwback to the Islamic medieval Cult of the Assassins, it is the West that seeks to suppress the enemies it terms terrorists by decapitating their organisations with drones. But what if killing the people at the top of a terrorist organisation – or anyone you’re fighting with – is like cutting the heads off a hydra: that every time you take one off, another two grow in its place? Perhaps a more …
On the 11th of September 2001, we returned from a miraculous day wandering, eventually barefoot, through a jungle in the Mexican Yucatan, led by a Mayan girl to waterfalls that tumbled down steps gouged into smooth bowls in the soft limestone. Between the trees enormous blue crabs scuttled. At last, exhilarated, we found ourselves in the girl’s hut, a circular house with a palm frond roof and an earth floor and, bizarrely, satellite TV. As …
So Osama Bin Laden is, apparently, dead – but at what cost to America, the West and the rest of the world? I can’t help feeling that we, and the US in particular, mishandled the whole 9/11 catastrophe. At the beginning of a new millennium, attacked, all we could do was to resort to an eye for an eye. Worse, we used it as cover to attack an Iraq that clearly had nothing to do …
