Keay's main theme, that the modern Middle East has been manipulated and shaped largely by outsiders, is an approach that is congenial in that part of the world, where, as the saying used to have it, "if two fish fight, the British are behind it".
Soon the main centre of Arabic theatre moved to Egypt, whose comparatively tolerant autonomy offered an atmosphere for literary and artistic creativity more congenial than other parts of the Ottoman Empire.
The mood for the most part has been congenial, like a page from "The Book of Hours".
It's a community that Ms. Waldman, 36, writes about knowingly in the novel: "Though the parts of Brooklyn congenial to people in their demographic had expanded dramatically in a widening web of faux-dives and mysteriously hip restaurants, to Nate the place seemed never to have been smaller, so dense was it with people he knew".
Although Boston was comparatively congenial when compared to other parts of the country, Trotter and others felt that Washington's stance was leading to an increase in more typically Southern racist attitudes in the city.
Mrs. Whitman's hearing was congenial compared with Ms. Norton's, in part because she has a relatively sound environmental record and in part because she comes from a state that suffers from the problems, like dirty air, dirty water and vanishing wetlands, that her agency deals with.
Thus Mencius acknowledges that there are natural parts of the self that must be disciplined and held in check while Xunzi acknowledges that there are natural parts that are largely congenial to morality in the sense that they are the natural basis for taking great satisfaction and contentment in virtue once one has gotten the self-aggrandizing desires and emotions under control.
More recent formulations are more congenial to social models of disability, in part because of Nussbaum's encounter with disability scholarship.
There was the ascent of the digital realm — with the happy surrender, on the part of hundreds of millions, to the congenial omniscience and possibly less congenial omnipotence of Google, and the perplexingly popular appeal of making available online all manner of information of the sort formerly considered private.
Yet the role proved surprisingly congenial.
