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Lead book review

Edward Said — a lonely prophet of doom

Even Edward Said would not have claimed to be ‘the 20th century’s most celebrated intellectual’. But neither was he ‘Professor of Terror’, says Justin Marozzi

13 March 2021

9:00 AM

13 March 2021

9:00 AM

Places of the Mind: A Life of Edward Said Timothy Brennan

Bloomsbury, pp.464, 25

It had been billed as a clash of the Titans. Boston, 22 November 1986: two giants of their field slugging it out in the circus, a shootout at the scholars’ corral. The atmosphere was electric. Here was the long-awaited confrontation between Edward Said, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and Bernard Lewis, emeritus professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton.

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