Justin Marozzi
Tyranny of Trifles
Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands
By Aatish Taseer
Canongate 324pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
A message to married men having extra-marital affairs: beware of fathering a child with your mistress and then abandoning them. One day said child may discover literary inclinations and write a book that you may find humiliating in the extreme. Never mind the old adage. Stranger to History is a case of hell hath no fury like filial scorn.
Aatish Taseer is marvellously suited to writing this book about personal identity, religion and a quest to make sense of his past. With a Pakistani politician father and Indian journalist mother he neatly straddles the divide that Partition engraved across the subcontinent. And several years studying and working
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 Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back
'To her enemies she was the alien temptress who led Charles I away from the "true religion" of Protestantism and towards royal absolutism.'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews @LeandadeLisle's 'colourful', 'persuasive' new biography of Henrietta Maria.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'Empathy is our moral portal gun, and it jams from underuse.'
Don Paterson on Portal 2, catching Covid on the Eurostar, and rereading Ian Hamilton’s 'Against Oblivion'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony