Michael Burleigh
Chaos Theory
The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and the Battle for Arabia
By Gregory D Johnsen
Oneworld 352pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
The terrorist assault on the In Amenas gas facility in Algeria in January, by a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) seeking the limelight, led David Cameron to declare that a ‘large and existential threat’ to the West existed in North Africa. He made this pronouncement even as black Malians, some of whom are still enslaved to Arabs and Tuaregs, welcomed troops from their former colonial overlord who delivered them from Islamist tyranny.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The poem leads us, but no person takes us by the hand. It is not like Virgil or Homer, whose poems start with invocations to a muse.'
Michael Schmidt on the Epic of Gilgamesh.
http://ow.ly/CiLM50xV2sk
'The Bible is all but silent on yellow, as it is on most colours.'
http://ow.ly/TEWD50xV2cs
'Houses always reveal something of their occupants, but none so much as writers’ houses.'
Frances Wilson goes from Keats House to Dove Cottage and beyond.
http://ow.ly/Efja50xrrbM