14 OCTOBER 2006, Page 26

Expert and bully

From James McEvoy

Sir: Congratulations to Frank Johnson (Shared opinion, 30 September) for spotting that William Dalrymple has turned into something of a bully. I like Dalrymple’s writing and loved his first book (In Xanadu), but now he is an Expert, given to implying that the East is so magnificent and complicated that only he can understand it. He wrote in the New York Review of Books last year that al-Qa’eda has ‘explicitly political’ aims, which seems rather to leave out the religious dimension. Perhaps he finds Islam so magnificent and complicated that he is blind to its occasional viciousness.

James McEvoy Denver, Colorado, USA