Beyond Selidor

The Central Asian setting is the best thing about Every Rising Sun — an absolute delight. I really love anything that reminds me of a time and place in which the centre of the world was basically everything including and west of Türkiye, and everything east of western China. It's such a different frame of reference to our own world.

Applebaum is a frustrating commentator and historian for me for this reason. She's a textbook example of a very clever person, incredibly perceptive about some issues (i.e. the global interconnectedness of right-wing authoritarianism) so trapped by certain biases and ideological frameworks that she's incapable of seeing past them.