The man who defended Orientalism

“As a young man visiting a Sufi shrine in Algeria,” remarks the writer Robert Irwin parenthetically in an otherwise scholarly essay on medieval Arabic literature, “I once encountered a jinni in the form of a cat.” No further elaboration is …

Why the fairies disappeared

It’s a long time since I took mushrooms, but my recollection is that the experience is profoundly reality-warping. Assumptions dissolve; mundane details or textures are suddenly fascinating; the wider world no longer echoes back your habitual understanding of it, but …