SOURCE: Howe, Stephen. “Never the Twain?” New Statesman and Society 9, no. 403 (17 May 1996): 39-40.

In the following excerpt, Howe evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of The Missionary and the Libertine.

The idea of a fundamental difference between “east” and “west,” Europe and Asia, has been one of the most constantly renewed clichés of world history. It is at least as old as the Greek-Persian wars of 2,500 years ago, and as new as the febrile US debates about the “clash of civilisations,” the supposed economic threat from East Asia and the political one from Islam.

It has never been clear where Europe ends and Asia starts, geographically or culturally. In one sense, that is what Greeks and Turks, Serbs and Croats, even Russian presidential candidates, fight about. Ian Buruma and Jack Goody are hardly the first to point out the falsity of that edifice of ideas, but in their...