Word: nasser
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...from 1956 to 1965, of having been a double agent for the Soviet Union. He charges the service with bugging friendly French and West German embassies in London and breaking into Soviet consulates abroad. Wright also says MI5 was involved in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser during the 1956 Suez crisis. The accusations are not new: since retiring in 1976, Wright has pursued a campaign to make his charges known. Moreover, other authors have published similar allegations...
...ignited early. He walked miles to school, often slept in a mosque, and was booted out of secondary school after starting a student strike. He later entered a military academy, where he immersed himself in the Koran and the passionate speeches in praise of Arab nationalism by Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom Gaddafi came to worship. After graduating, he spent ten months at a British army signals school...
...many Arabs, smarting from their defeat at the hands of Israel in the 1967 war, the strutting 27-year-old Gaddafi seemed to provide an image of Arab pride. Gaddafi saw himself as the heir to Nasser's crusade for Arab unity, and he would later form paper unions with Egypt, Morocco, Syria and Sudan. He engineered the ouster of British and American bases in Libya and negotiated shrewd deals with Western oil companies to yield greater revenues for Libya. With that money, Gaddafi set about to make good on his promises of free housing, medical care and education...
Both affection and sympathy shine through Kureishi's ironic treatment of Omar and Johnny. His portrait of the assimilated "Pakis," however, is another matter: priceless if only for its scathing directness, Nasser's house is divided between traditionally attired and silent females and the Westernized (read: loud) and self-satisfied males. Nasser himself remains an important hair's breadth away from merely detestable because he retains a sense of brotherly loyalty and an affectionate nature--although he does deal in very detestable and profitable muck. The real villain is Nasser's right-hand man, the fully macho Salim, who smuggles...
Within his social commentary, Kureishi leaves room for a bit of the fanciful. One very satisfying moment occurs when Nasser's wife, sick of his philandering, takes action and cooks up a strange potion against his mistress, charmingly played by Shirley Anne Field. This dreadful concoction makes the mistress' furniture move around and causes a rash to break out on her stomach...