Welcome to the Green Zone
IT’S NOT LIKE I WAS EXPECTING STALINGRAD, but Baghdad took the piss. Arriving for the first time, tucked into a UN car, I watched as the city lights refracted through the bulletproof glass. Floodlights hovered over a pickup football game, square lamps uplit the National Museum, fairy lights dripped down palm trees beside the Tigris...
Brouhaha in Baghdad
HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO Nussaibah Younis, whose debut social and political satire has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, having already gathered a truckload of rapturous reviews including The Irish Times, Guardian and The Times, which describes Fundamentally as Bridget Jones in Iraq. This novel, a tale of a heartbroken English academic who...
Boneland
He plunged his rigid shaft directly into her moist centre, like a mighty sword of faith thrust into the heart of an unbeliever… ‘We’re nearly out of toilet paper. Is there any more?’ Jamie came into the kitchen, still in his pyjamas, yawning, and scratching at his belly in a half-hearted manner. ‘Check in the...
Fatima Bhutto: Lost hearts and souls
Fatima Bhutto’s second novel The Runaways is a provocative, astute and ever-timely exploration of what makes three young people in Pakistan and England reject the society that raised them and sign up to the war against the West. Anita, growing up in a sprawling Karachi slum, aims to better herself with book learning but finds...
You didn’t understand…
In May 2016, Gresham College in London hosted a symposium on the subject of ‘Cultural Heritage and War’. Chaired by Professor Tim Connell, it featured Sir Derek Plumbly, speaking on British and American policy and the temporal lapses between historical awareness and political action, Dr Elisabeth Kendall, discussing ‘poetry as war’, ‘poems as swords’, and...
