[Book review] Mediterraneans : a quarterly review

Abstract

This is a wonderful quarterly review that is likely to appeal to people both outside the Academy and within it. Born out of an idea by Dr Ken Brown, an anthropologist at the University of Manchester who has conducted fieldwork in the Moroccan city of Sale, and in joint editorship with Robert Waterhouse, Mediterraneans groups together articles on a wide variety of topics: the arts, literature, poetry, politics and contemporary affairs. This first number is a banquet of the most varied of dishes with the most unexpected of tastes, and the editors have assembled their material with passion, affection, style, and discernment. There is enough here to appeal to most tastes, though perhaps less for those with an interest in the visual and popular arts. There is an article by Juan Goytisolo on the City of the Dead which has humorous and delicate flashes reminiscent of the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, yet a sensitive and sympathetic feel for the people and the environment. The journalist David Hirst on Saddam before Kuwait in an article previously published elsewhere, gives a revealing portrait on the paranoid complexities of tyranny.