‘This book with its felicitous title brings together with great skill and sensitivity a large amount of current historical scholarship on the trade and civilization of the Indian Ocean during the Islamic centuries. It will be welcomed by both students and teachers as a fine introduction to a complex subject.”

Dostoyevsky's antisemitism, manifested in his writings of the 1870s, seems to contradict his humanism, and many critics have tended to dismiss it as a marginal detail of the writer's views. Argues, however, that antisemitism held an important place in Dostoyevsky's ethical system, and was linked to his vexed relationship with Christianity. Notes that he staunchly held three ethical principles: sanctity of children, incompatibility of ethics with utilitarianism and calculation, and the view that every kind of authority was bound by the same moral strictures as individuals. Thus, he could not accept a God who had sacrificed his "son" or a redemption brought about by the suffering of a child (Jesus). Dostoyevsky invented the image of a Jew onto whom he could project everything that was unacceptable to him in religion and Western ethics. He considered the "merchant ethics" of both liberalism and socialism to be a Jewish idea and, in particular, regarded the politics of the "Jew" Disraeli as an embodiment of such ethics: to sacrifice innocent Balkan Slavs in the name of supreme political principles. In the 1870s, Dostoyevsky increasingly contrasted the Russian conception of God and compassion for the weak with the Jewish-Western "merchant God" and the idea of obtaining benefits for one person from the suffering of another, innocent person. He developed a conception of principal opposition between things Russian and things Jewish.

A young man sets forth to seek his fortune. Accompanied by his faithful horse and cunning cat, he crosses a land of thieves, meets a scientific magician, Allies with a strange tribe across the sea and finally faces war.