Robert Irwin is one of the best known writers on the history and culture of the Islamic world (The Arabian Nights: A Companion; The Alhambra and most recently For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and their Enemies). He is also an acclaimed novelist (Arabian Nightmare) and is Middle East editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.
For many children of the sixties a 'journey to the East' was a necessary rite of passage. In an extraordinary memoir Robert Irwin contrasts the contexts of England - the new culture and the hippy trail - with those of Algeria - bombs and guns and mysticism.
Robert Irwin is one of the best known writers on the history and culture of the Islamic world (The Arabian Nights: A Companion; The Alhambra and most recently For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and their Enemies). He is also an acclaimed novelist (Arabian Nightmare) and is Middle East editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.
A fascinating journey into the spirit and adventure of the sixties
by someone who was there, and who, luckily for us, remembered every
extraordinary thing.
*Esther Freud*
The richness of texture and tone...coupled with the unusual nature
of the story...make Memoirs of a Dervish compelling, fascinating
and enriching.
*Spectator*
This is a heady, insightful and melancholy trip.
*Word*
What emerges here is a tale as fluid and as finally mysterious as
the life it recounts...Here, at last, Irwin may have found a truly
perennial philosophy.
*New Statesman*
Packed with extraordinary characters and incidents as well as (this
being the sixties) a generous helping of drugs, sex and rock 'n'
roll.
*London Review Bookshop*
Irwin's witty, casually erudite tribute to his clever, naïve youth
shows that there are no shortcuts to wisdom. But if often comes
with age.
*Independent on Sunday*
Memoirs of a Dervish - charged with life, humanity and humour -
opens one's eyes to possibilities, which was what the 1960s vibe
was about, after all.
*Financial Times*
I could not put down Memoirs of a Dervish until I had read it twice
over. This is a brilliant, free-ranging, mind-enhancing,
life-cautioning book. Beware.
*The Independent*
Robert Irwin's memoir is a fabulously entertaining tale.
*The Metro*
Irwin brilliantly conjures up the mood of the late Sixties, with
its blind innocence, fanciful enthusiasms and blissful music...For
the reader, the journey - and the fall - is an illuminating and
immensely engrossing one.
*Literary Review*
An extraordinary book.
*Conde Nast Traveller*
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