‘Corruption of the Best’

Out of Place: A Memoir, by Edward W. Said (Knopf, 352 pp., $26.95)

EDWARD Said is one of our most celebrated and public intellectuals. His gifts are huge, his reading very wide indeed, and he has a turbulent prose style all his own. A professor of literature at Columbia University, he has long been able to command whatever platform he likes. Of Christian Arab—or, to be secular about it, Levantine—origins, he happens to be the son of a man who had taken out American citizenship as long ago as the First World War. A cosmopolitan at home in East and West alike, he was in an almost unique position to elucidate and bridge both cultures.

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David Pryce-Jones

David Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British author and commentator and served as a senior editor of National Review.

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National Review

Out of Place: A Memoir, by Edward W. Said (Knopf, 352 pp., $26.95)

EDWARD Said is one of our most celebrated and public intellectuals. His gifts are huge, his reading very wide indeed, and he has a turbulent prose style all his own. A professor of literature at Columbia University, he has long been able to command whatever platform he likes. Of Christian Arab—or, to be secular about it, Levantine—origins, he happens to be the son of a man who had taken out American citizenship as long ago as the First World War. A cosmopolitan at home in East and West alike, he was in an almost unique position to elucidate and bridge both cultures.