Christopher de Bellaigue is writing a series of books about Suleyman the Magnificent.
Hossein Kharrazi’s bicycle was leaning against the wall of his parents’ house in Isfahan. Mrs Kharrazi told me to come in, rearranging her chador so it wouldn’t slide off her head. I took off my shoes and she showed me into a living-room that looked onto a courtyard with a persimmon tree in the middle. There was a big mural on one of the walls, a copy of a photograph...
I’m wearing tails and waistcoat for my wedding, but this isn’t the Home Counties. I’m getting married in Tehran to Bita Ghezelayagh, an Iranian architect who studied in Paris, and I’m determined to express my ‘cultural identity’. What has my identity got to do with Four Weddings and a Funeral? Not much, but the Iranians will get the point. Better to be...
‘Oriental history,’ the German philologist Johann Jakob Reiske wrote in 1747, ‘is very worthy of the study of an honest mind, and does not deserve any less than European...
Mossadegh, whose family belonged to the nobility, was an unlikely leader of Iran’s transition from dynastic monarchy to mass politics.
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