He is the author of six works of non-fiction: The Middle East in the Middle Ages (1984), The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994), Islamic Art (1997), Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999), Alhambra (2004), and For Lust of Knowing The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006). He has published six novels: The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), The Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (1997), and Satan Wants Me (1999). Robert Irwin goes rollerblading most days and takes part in rollerblading marathons.His other pursuits include juggling, pinball and cooking. He is the commissioning editor for the TLS for The Middle East and writes for a number of newspapers and journals in the UK and the USA. He also lectured on Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford. He read Modern History at Oxford and taught Medieval History at the University of St Andrews.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.Robert Irwin was born in 1946. Augmented by some 19th century lithographs by David Roberts, which couple nicely with Irwin's sinuous prose, The Arabian Nightmare thrusts us into a landscape as convoluted as Cairo itself, yet by some magical slight-of-hand we at length come to recognize Balian's malady as one of our own.Ĭopyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. Lazarus and Yoll himself are just a few of the characters sent forth to mend or maim him. The Father of Cats, seductive Zuleyka, Fatima the Deathly, the leper Knights of St. The English king has recruited him to spy on the Mameluke court in Cairo, but when he arrives there in 1486, he immediately contracts a mysterious disease that causes hallucinations powerful enough to threaten his sanity. This, then, is to be a bedtime story that introduces Balian, an English pilgrim on his way to Mount Sinai. The narrator, who may or may not be Dirty Yoll, a Cairene storyteller of the 15th century, reaches forward through time to take Proust's opening line"For a long time I used to go to bed early"for his own.
This higly original first novel is deliberately designed to madden: virtually plotless, it's nonetheless loaded with a cat's cradle tangle of mythic tales, with sibylline commentary from a host of wraithlike creatures, who are never what they seem, and with dream sequences that provide ample room for the author's playful dilations on the nature of illusion and reality.
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