What went wrong

Paul Kennedy’s review of Bernard Lewis’s latest book on Islam and the west contains more wisdom than many screeds in the aftermath of 11 September. According to Lewis, the divide between the two is “one of the greatest cultural and political divides in modern history”. Sorting out Afghanistan and finishing off Qaeda will hardly make a dent in this chasm.

I’ll single out one nugget. “The works of Mozart and Shakespeare and Voltaire have traveled around the globe, as for that matter have Stravinsky, jazz and George Orwell. But they all pretty much stop at the frontiers of the Arab world, which has shown little interest in how others think, write, compose.”