Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface
Civilization and Savagery
Part I. The Desert
Chapter 1. A ‘Perpetual Sunrise’: The Alexandrian Library
Chapter 2. ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’: William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Chapter 3. ‘Then, oh! Unbar this churlish gate’: The Crusades
Chapter 4. ‘And wrote my will across the sky in stars’: T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Chapter 5. ‘ . . . a Talking Bird, a Singing Tree, and some Golden Water . . .’: The Arabian Nights
Part II. The Sea
Chapter 6. ‘Every life was a spark’: Derek Walcott’s Omeros
Chapter 7. ‘Our faithful guide through all the vicissitudes of climates’: Polynesian Navigation.
Chapter 8. ‘A brutal innocence’: Gauguin and Primitivism
Part III. The Land
Chapter 9. ‘Meet heaven and earth, and here let all things end!’: Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine
Chapter 10. ‘A dream within a dream’: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses
Chapter 11. The ‘History House’: Arundhati Roy’s, The God of Small Things.
Chapter 12. A ‘tear on the cheek of time’: The Taj Mahal at Agra.
The Citadel
Index