From “To Know and to Know Not,” a lecture delivered in May at the annual Premio Gregor von Rezzori ceremony in Florence, Italy.

If you are from somewhere else, living somewhere else . . . no, if you are an African or an Arab living in Europe . . . no, if you are a Libyan and therefore both African and Arab, and moved as a boy to England in the Eighties . . . after all that has happened, after Balfour and World War II, after the invasion and occupation of Palestine, and long after Kipling, after all the countless gestures of reduction and prejudice, long after your…