Few historians end up as historical actors in their own right, but
Bernard Lewis has both witnessed and participated in some of the key
events of the last century. When we think of the Middle East, we see it
in terms that he defined and articulated.
In this exceptional memoir he shares stories of his wartime service in
London and Cairo, decrypting intercepts for MI6, with sometimes
unexpected consequences. After the war, he was the first Western scholar
ever invited into the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. He coined the term
"clash of civilizations" in the 1950s, when no one imagined that
political Islam would one day eclipse communism. A brilliant raconteur
with an extraordinary gift for languages (he mastered thirteen), he
regales us with tales of memorable encounters with Edward Kennedy, the
Shah of Iran, Golda Meir, and Pope John Paul II among many others.
September 11 catapulted him onto the world stage as his seminal books
What Went Wrong? and Crisis of Islam leaped onto bestseller lists.
In his first major book since the second Iraq war, Lewis describes
how--contrary to popular fiction--he opposed the war and reveals his
exchanges with the Bush administration outlining his far greater
concerns about Iran.
For more than half a century, Bernard Lewis has taken influential and
controversial positions on contemporary politics and on the politics of
academe. A man of towering intellect and erudition, he writes with the
flair of Toynbee or Gibbon, only he has seen more and is much funnier.
