The author's subjects were the statesman's passions: poverty, especially in relation to family breakdown; the persistence of ethnicity; the limits, errors, and necessity of social policy; in matters of war and peace, liberal illusions and conservative excesses.
And the Islam of al-Afghani's ideological heirs has made little headway in non-Muslim countries.There is one contemporary Asian phenomenon that, Mr Mishra notes, would seem far less surprising to the author's subjects than to many present-day Westerners.
If this weren't the case, her fable would be not the masterpiece that it is, but a clinical case study of masochism, author's and subject's, in the form of a mildly heretical, comically exalted, didactically perverse, and ultimately banal piece of French art porn, like the volume here under review.
The author's real subject is the heave and crush of modern, polyglot Rome, and he renders the jabs of everyday speech with such precision that the novel feels exclaimed rather than written.
Iyer has set out to examine Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, as a part of a larger set of ideas and thinkers — a towering example of the cross-cultural interconnectedness that has been the author's particular subject.
The author's ostensible subject is the prospective marriage between a conventional American journalist, Tim Nolinger, and a conventional French antique dealer, Anne-Sophie d'Argel, who is the daughter of a famous French novelist, Estelle d'Argel.
The author's royalty — a subject of fierce debate between literary agents and publishing executives — is calculated among some of the large trade publishers as 25 percent of the gross revenue, while others are calculating it off the consumer price.
For non-neophytes, the book's greatest interest will probably lie in the author's selection of subjects: William James, Charles Darwin and even Mary Shelley appear here, among the usual suspects from Thales to Rawls and beyond.
