Robert Irwin

In recent times Orientalists have been variously accused of imperialism, colonialism and distorting history. Robert Irwin powerfully overturns this view and radically reassesses their influence and legacy: he makes the definitive case for the Orientalists. Irwin charts the origins of Orientalism and its foremost practitioners, from Ancient Greece up to the present day. In doing so, he finally banishes the ghosts of Edward Said's Orientalism and shows that, whether making philological comparisons between Arabic and Hebrew, cataloguing the coins of Fatimid Egypt or establishing the basic chronology of Harun al-Rashid's military campaigns against Byzantium, scholars have been unified not by politics or by ideology but by their shared obsession. For Lust of Knowing is an extraordinary, passionate book, both a sustained argument and a brilliant work of original scholarship.

"Zoe isn't the intellectual type, which is why she doesn't recognize world-famous author Thomas Rocher when she stumbles into his apartment...and into his life. It's also why she doesn't know that Rocher is supposed to be dead. Rocher faked his death years ago to escape his critics, and has been making a killing releasing his new work as "lost manuscripts," in cahoots with his editor/ex-wife Agathe. Zoe doesn't know Balzac from Batman, but she's going to have to wise up fast... because she's sitting on the literary scandal of the century!"--

"The Alhambra is the only Muslim palace to have survived from the Middle Ages. Built by a bloody and threatened dynasty of Muslim Spain, it was preserved as a monument to the triumph of Christianity. Every day tourists in their thousands are entranced by its superb site, its towers and courts, its fountained gardens, its honeycombed ceilings and its intricate tile work. Much of what they see is the invention of later generations. Its highly sophisticated decoration is not just random but full of hidden meaning. Its most magnificent buildings were designed not by architects, but by philosophers and poets. It is a place of many mysteries. Even its purpose is not always clear. The Alhambra, which resembles a fairy tale palace, was constructed by slave labour in an era of economic decline, plague and political violence. Its beautifully decorated halls witnessed many murders. The Alhambra's influence on art, and on literature, Orientalist painting and Granada cinemas, Washington Irving and Borges, has been significant. Robert Irwin helps us to understand that story fully."--BOOK JACKET.

In recent times Orientalists, with their passion and fascination for the East, have been variously accused of imperialism, colonialism and distorting history. In this new book Robert Irwin overturns these views and radically reassesses the influence and legacy of the Orientalists. Robert Irwin has spent a lifetime investigating and imagining the history of the Islamic world. In For Lust of Knowing, the culmination of that lifetime's devotion, he makes the definitive case for the Orientalists. Irwin charts the origins of Orientalism - in this case, the study of the Middle and near East - and its foremost practitioners, from Ancient Greece to the present day. In doing so, he finally banishes the ghosts of Edward Said's Orientalism, which branded this rich and wondrous field of study a weapon of imperialism. Irwin shows that, whether making philological comparisons between Arabic and Hebrew, cataloguing the coins of Fatimid Egypt or establishing the basic chronology of Harun al-Rashid's military campaigns against Byzantium, these scholars have been unified not by politics or by ideology but by their shared obsession.

Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.

"Beginning with the Palm Sunday Battle of Towton, the bloodiest ever fought on English soil, this relates the fabulous adventures of one man and his noble family amid the chaos and political intrigue that beset England during the War of the Roses, when two great houses battled for control of the throne. The young Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales and brother to the future queen, Elizabeth Woodville, seems to die during that battle and be resurrected. While dead, he witnesses the Grail ceremony last seen during the age of King Arthur, before England was cursed by war and Hell so filled with bodies that the dead now walk the land. What he wakes to and witnesses for the rest of his life as he defends his king is a ceaseless stream of wonders: a family rumored to be descended from the fairy Melusine and imbued with her dragon's blood, a talking head that predicts the future, a miraculous cauldron, a museum of skulls, alchemists and wizards, the Swordsman's Pentacle, and plenty of battles, sieges, swordplay, jousts, treachery, murder, beheadings, and horrific torture. And all the while, stories--some so porous that their characters enter history and threaten their maker"--

Dating from at least a millennium ago, this title features the earliest known Arabic short stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. It features monsters, lost princes, jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle, sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.

"Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world--a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas. Irwin tells how Ibn Khaldun, who lived in a world decimated by the Black Death, held a long series of posts in the tumultuous Islamic courts of North Africa and Muslim Spain, becoming a major political player as well as a teacher and writer. Closely examining the Muqaddima, a startlingly original analysis of the laws of history, and drawing on many other contemporary sources, Irwin shows how Ibn Khaldun's life and thought fit into historical and intellectual context, including medieval Islamic theology, philosophy, politics, literature, economics, law, and tribal life. Because Ibn Khaldun's ideas often seem to anticipate by centuries developments in many fields, he has often been depicted as more of a modern man than a medieval one, and Irwin's account of such misreadings provides new insights about the history of Orientalism. In contrast, Irwin presents an Ibn Khaldun who was a creature of his time--a devout Sufi mystic who was obsessed with the occult and futurology and who lived in an often-strange world quite different from our own."--Dust jacket.

Stories from the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, including the well-known ones of Aladdin and the lamp, Ali Baba and the forty thieves, and Sinbad the sailor.