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“... the text of The Middle East has not been written by the author of the captions. Bernard Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, is a fluent, lively, erudite and lucid writer. He also has an eye for the pointillist anecdote and pithy maxim culled from the primary sources. His book appears in a ‘History of ...”

“... Professor Bernard Lewis enjoys a worldwide reputation as a scholar of Near-Eastern history, and in his most recent work, Semites and Anti-Semites, he has chosen to concentrate his formidable powers of analysis, and a massive accumulation of fact, upon a relatively restricted topic, which nevertheless raises large questions of historical and political understanding ...”

“... imperialism’ is a simplistic formula. One of Said’s principal targets in Orientalism was Bernard Lewis, a British scholar now at Princeton University. Said and Lewis have become well-known sparring partners in the Orientalism debate – although their clashes have sometimes generated more heat than ...”

“... East experts identified long ago as having the most influence over American Middle East policy, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Now in his late eighties, Lewis came to the US from the UK some thirty years ago to teach at Princeton. His fervent anti-Communism and disapproval of everything about contemporary Arabs and ...”

“... Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism. The second speaker was Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University. I knew his work well – who didn’t? The title of one of his books encapsulates his views: What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. Clash of Civilisations: here we come. The third ...”

“... Street. Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had ...”

“... and analysts of the Middle East who taught in Britain. Among them were Kedourie, P.J. Vatikiotis, Bernard Lewis and Anne Lambton, none of whom objected to being labelled ‘Orientalists’. Hourani was distressed by the acrimony attacks on the profession of Orientalism engendered and by insinuations that its discourse was inherently malevolent, believing ...”

“... is being nudged into the cultural limelight, this time by clash-of-civilisations warriors such as Bernard Lewis, who proclaim curiosity to be the distinguishing feature of the West, in woeful contrast to the alleged indifference of Muslim societies to other ways of life. If the battle is to be joined for a second time, it would be helpful to know how it ...”

“... he defends scholars singled out for attack in Orientalism (H.A.R. Gibb, Gustave von Grunebaum and Bernard Lewis among others), before moving on to a chapter-length critique of Orientalism itself. So how effectively does Irwin challenge Said? Factual purists will be delighted by his pot-shots. He makes mincemeat of such sweeping assertions as ‘Britain ...”

“... in mid-March 2003. Nafisi didn’t support the war, but she thanked its academic architect, Bernard Lewis, in her acknowledgments for ‘opening the door’. The popularity of the book made Nafisi a target – Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia academic, intemperately compared her to Lynndie England – but Reading Lolita in Tehran is political in the way ...”

“... of which not one but two recent translations into English exist. We ignore these works, and take Bernard Lewis as our guide, at our peril. Once the 19th century is reached, the narrative takes on the more traditional form of ‘a race against time’ and a modernising push driven largely by Europeans, until the ‘limits of empire’ are reached. This ...”

“... which trace an individual movement towards Christianity, like Muir’s Autobiography and C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy. He remarks, in the quietly authoritative tone that characterises his book: ‘Muir’s childhood is at once the shortest and the most dominant of all those known to me in the literature of autobiography.’ He is exceptionally ...”

“... and with great enjoyment in French and Italian, and perhaps above all in German: one letter to Bernard Berenson speaks nostalgically of returning to her adolescent love for the 13th-century Minneleider and the Old Icelandic Edda; in another, she picks up Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse as a ‘diversion’ from her own writing and finds it ...”

“... almost as large in anti-orientalist mythology as Khomeini in Middle America: Elie Kedourie and Bernard Lewis. Lewis is singled out for his smug and unthinking assumptions about ‘Western’ intellectual superiority. At the heart of his and similar attitudes Said discerns an epistemological naivety that would never ...”

“... Readers in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom’. Carmen bin Ladin, the ex-wife of Osama’s brother Yeslam, and Farah Pahlavi, the Shah’s widow, have published memoirs to respectful ...”