Rounded stone and glass objects with fine radiating scratches on one surface represent the slickstones that were used in garment-making and laundry, to smooth the cloth and to press seams and pleats.
What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in some whack-a-mole horror show, the quashing of a jihadi enclave here only spurs the sprouting of another there; that the ideology of Al Qaeda is still reverberating through a blocked Arab world whose Sunni-Shia balance (insofar as that went) was upended by the American invasion of Iraq.
Its sting preserved to literature a fierce peculiar genius [Waugh] who, in the 40 years before his death last week at 62, achieved recognition as the grand old mandarin of modern British prose and as a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers’ row (Swift, Pope, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters.
At the end of a buttock-clenching trip, we landed to find Eritrean helicopters crouched on the tarmac of an airport that had just been bombed by Ethiopian jets.
