Maggie's Farm

From the NYT review of Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War: The 2500-year Struggle Between East and West (meaning the West and Islam), a quote:

The real value of “Worlds at War” may lie in a secondary theme: the West’s long, tragicomic history of trying to civilize and modernize the East. In the first century B.C., Octavian’s defeat of Antony and Egypt was portrayed by the Romans as the triumph of “a free and virtuous West” over “a tyrannical and corrupt East.” Almost 2,000 years later, in 1920, Shiites and Sunnis were killing each other in Mesopotamia, British officers were dying, and The Times of London wrote, “How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?”

Whole review here.