When the gracious young lady who is helping to organize the Hay Festival assigned this book to me to review, she said breezily, “It’ll be perfect for you because you’re so into cricket!” Having come to the end of this marvellous, sprawling, picaresque novel I can see how in one sense this observation was right […]
William Dalrymple was one of the – nay, perhaps the biggest name at the Hay Dhaka. His latest book is Return of a King – the subject of which this talk with Salahdin Imam centered on. SI: I must say that reading your last book Return of a King about the First Afghan War of […]
Read More… from William Dalrymple: “I knew at that point I had my book”
If a process as crucial as the January 5 election is flawed in a basic way, all sorts of undesirable consequences arise that we cannot, and should not, countenance AQ Shamim “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world .The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full […]
Read More… from The general ‘selection’ and catastrophic consequences
SCURRYING along a narrow Paris street which I thought would be a shortcut to Boulevard Madeleine, I noticed with a chill that it was the Rue Cambon and that I was face to face with the back exit of the Hotel Ritz. At this exact spot, Diana had come rushing out that night, as if […]
The Islamic path to inner health Irshad outlines an approach to coping in difficult times. Bismillah ir Rahman ir Rahim (To the righteous soul Will be said:) ‘0 thou soul, In (complete) rest And satisfaction! ‘Come back thou To thy Lord, –Well pleased (thyself) And well-pleasing Unto Him! ‘Enter thou, then Among the Devotees! ‘Yea, […]
YOU KNOW I don’t think the full Significance of Let it Bleed has dawned yet on any of us. The album was released about four months ago; we got it green and appetizing, it ripened quickly into prime yellow and as it moved through time, acquired the characteristic rich brown brocade textures of old age. […]
ALL US rock and roll freaks are also inveterate list-makers, and we spend a large part of our non-〉listening hours Ranking the Groups we listen to the rest of the time.The puzzle is that in nearly every such reckoning the Beatles come out regularly, monotonously on top of the heap. This is puzzling because the […]
VERY FEW rock groups, and even fewer American ones, manage to make music that is not only complex in its musical structure but at the same time retains the visceral, frantic dynamism that one associates with true rock&roll.; The Bead Game is one of the finest rock-groups in he country precisely because its music is […]
IN ANY attempt to understand Bob Dylan’s works, one ought to consider his music, his lyrics and his singing style separately, since each of these three elements has different history in the development of his art. Their conjunction–in the various stages of each’s evolution–is responsible for both the wide variety of Dylan’s musical output, and […]
Between the two Soldiers’ Field meetings, a massive student defection from the SDS position took place. In part, the call to discontinue the strike sprang from weariness and the fear of academic abortion that haunts all of us. Yet it is important to realize that there was a definite element of political rationality in the […]