Throughout his long writing career, David Caute has shown a readiness to tackle large themes and to use a range of narrative techniques in his novels. His subjects include African decolonization, seventeenth-century communal radicalism, 1960s student rebellion, 1980s feminism, and late-twentieth-century Muslim fundamentalism. The modes he has employed include naturalism, metafiction, allegory, symbolism, and magic realism. An historian and a journalist-as well as a novelist and playwright, and a skeptical supporter of the Left-he has written novels that blur the boundaries among history, reportage, and fiction, and have never avoided politics. His fiction has often provoked controversy on both political and literary grounds, attracting high praise and harsh condemnation.

John David Caute was born on 16 December 1936 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Colonel Edward Caute, a dentist in the British army, and Rebecca Perlzweig Caute. He was brought to live in England after a year, and from 1946 to 1950 he attended...