INTRODUCTION

More please:

Footnotes and appendices, James Baldwin, theatre, cinema, Alanis Morissette, prepositions, Jews, opera, Rick Stein, Keith Floyd, travel, blogs, galleries, Oscar Wilde, Nancy Ajram, Crystal Castles, Sylvia Plath, E.M. Forster, opera (especially Puccini), eschatology, underdogs, house parties, The Fray, the Bengal renaissance, Tiësto, Rachel Allen, surrealism, Om Kalthoum, morality, Jamiroquai, idiosyncrasy, abstract algebra, retail therapy, Victorian underworlds, Karen Walker, Middle-earth (literature and film), graffiti, Nitin Sawhney, listening to the Quran being recited, Ruchira Mukerjee, idle gossip, Ladbroke Grove, hanging out in bars and cafés, Edward Said, alternative states of consciousness, Satyajit Ray, evolution vs. creationism, Ishiguro, t-shirts, Ghazali, the British Museum, Placebo, pies, graphic novels, blasphemy, Cheb Khaled, grammar and punctuation (especially the semi-colon), books, Portishead, Jack Kerouac, The Verve, coffee, Ptolemaic Egypt, apple+blueberry crumble (i make a really good one), G.G. Marquez, summer storms, Kandinsky, tea and biscuits at about 4pm, Primrose Hill, sushi, long walks, Hoegaarden, British foreign policy towards Palestine in the inter-war period, classical Indian music (Hindustani), the sound of rain against my window (especially in the morning), churches built by Nicholas Hawksmoor (there are six in London), www.openDemocracy.net, local history, Sufism, horror films and period dramas, Indian history from antiquity to the Delhi Sultanates, autumn, Susan Sontag, barbecues, nerds/geeks/etc, Beethoven, the odd joint, blasphemy, tomboys.

Noooooooooooooo:

Novelty clothes, Taqwa snobs & Jesus junkies (the self-righteous, patronising types who want to save the world), neo-conservatism, tabloids and The Daily Telegraph, aubergines, multi-national corporations, Jeremy Kyle, people who don’t read and/or don’t have an opinion and they don’t even care, xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, Wahhabism, what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and the Middle East, how the problems facing Africa and the Kurdish nation go largely ignored by the world’s governments and media, what China has done to the Uighurs and to Tibet, what America has done to the world from Wounded Knee and the Phillipines to Iraq and the environment, Hegel, Guinness.