Justin Marozzi

The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, by Patrick Hennessey Patrick Hennessey was one of the British army’s self-proclaimed Bright Young Things, an Oxford graduate with a lust for combat and a literary bent. Born in 1982, he belongs to a generation of uniformed men and women who would, as he puts it, ‘do more and see more in five years than our fathers and uncles had packed into twenty-two on manoeuvres in Germany and rioting in Ulster’. Hard on the older generation, perhaps, but such have been the opportunities afforded by the War on Terror.

What little most of us know about Omar Khayyam can be summarised in two words: the Rubaiyat, a collection of his free-spirited quatrains made famous around the world by the translations of the 19th-century poet Edward Fitzgerald. It has been said that these immensely popular books, first published in 1859 and running into numerous editions, contributed more phrases to the English language than the Bible and Shakespeare combined. Hazhir Teimourian, a respected commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, has offered readers a much broader study of this 11th-century polymath in a work of considered scholarship and tremendous imaginative sympathy.

Volume five — or is it six? — in the Simpson autobiography series. For many people, one volume tends to be enough, but Simpson has a lot to tell. In this latest doorstopper, he offers us an engaging collection of ‘snapshots’, essays on a lively and eclectic bunch of characters he’s run into over the years. There’s a crooked extortioner, the maddeningly elusive Japanese emperor and empress, Saddam awaiting execution, film stars, Serbian contract killers, a child sorcerer in the Congo, Chinese tomb-raiders and ‘a variety of other thoroughly dubious people including Robert Mugabe and Alastair Campbell’. The last few words of that sentence, not buried midway through the book but on its very first page, are a masterstroke.

There are probably better ways to welcome tourists to your country than with the words, ‘Go home England. Bastards.’ To their credit, Henry Hemming and his travelling companion Al, both suspected by the Slovak border guards of being Islamic extremists and denied entry, do not go home. With a retaliatory cry of, ‘Go home Slovakia. Bastards,’ they drive away in their beloved truck Yasmine and the journey continues. And it is quite a journey. Fresh from university, the two fledgling artists travel through Turkey, Iran, Oman, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel and Iraq. Their mission: ‘an artistic expedition to the heart of the Islamic world in order to alter Western stereotypes of the region.

Had this excellent little book been available to American policy makers in 2002, say, it might have provided a usefully sobering corrective to the exuberance of the neocons. They wanted to rebuild the Middle East in their own image. Mark Allen would have judged that mission hubristic, inappropriate and, one suspects, doomed to failure. Ignorance of the Arab world, he laments, remains a striking feature in the West. ‘The number of outsiders who have a working knowledge of Arabic and a personal depth of experience of the region is tiny in comparison with its present significance to our own well-being.’ Five years after the Middle East crashed into our consciousness, that unfortunately remains the case.

It is a tribute to Pervez Musharraf’s powers of persuasion that after reading this book you’re not entirely sure which country he rules. Is it Pakistan or Fantasististan? The rational choice is Pakistan, but the country he describes belongs to another world altogether. Women are empowered, the madrassahs are being curbed, democracy is waxing, terrorism is waning, investment is up, poverty down, the economy is booming, it’s all marvellous. How on earth did Pakistan get by before the general came along? A quick corrective to this self-congratulatory tome is not difficult to find. Human Rights Watch, for example, says that in Azad Kashmir ‘the Pakistani government represses democratic freedoms, muzzles the press and practises routine torture’.

Craig Murray, formerly Our Man in Tashkent, was not your average ambassador. He put the wind up the Uzbeks with his uncompromising position on President Islam Karimov’s unspeakably grisly human rights record. This is the country that infamously boiled a dissident to death and then sentenced his mother to six years of hard labour when she had the temerity to complain about it. It is thanks to Murray’s efforts that the case was publicly aired in the first place and that the unfortunate mother’s sentence was subsequently commuted to a fine. Upsetting Uzbekistan is one thing.

Senior diplomats may be a charming bunch, but as a rule they are not known for their modesty. Years of rubbing shoulders with world leaders, however inconsequential, tend to go to their heads. Taking themselves too seriously is an occupational hazard. When it comes to publishing their memoirs, such arrogance and pomposity are not necessarily a bad thing. A diplomat’s inflated sense of his own importance can be hilariously, unintentionally entertaining. What more wonderful example of the genre than DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of Britain’s Ambassador to the US at the Time of 9/11 and the Iraq War, Sir Christopher Meyer’s gloriously self-regarding tome of last year? A monument to the man’s vanity, it superbly demonstrated what a complete ass he is.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author of the wonderful Travels with a Tangerine, his debut volume in the footsteps of the 14th-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah, wastes little time in getting going with this remarkable sequel. Give him a word and he’ll be etymologising before you can whip out your OED. And you’ll need one to keep up. Try moxibustion, epizoic, parallactical, aleatory, anastomosing and vaticinal for starters, all beyond this reviewer and, gratifyingly, the (admittedly limited) range of his laptop dictionary. On the second page he muses on the ‘pleasing orbitality’ of food and its terminology.