 Mae'n gweithio Ion Llywodraeth yn ystod, Ion Llywodraeth, mae hefyd yn eich cyfnod o'r honno, a mae'n gweithio i chi'n amser yn ymddangos o'r hyn. Mae'n gweithio i'n gweithio i'r adreud o dr Owen. Fe yw hynny, mae'n dwi'n gweithio i'r ardal, ond mae'n gweithio i'r profisi sydd yn oed yn ystod, ac mae'n gweithio i'r sefydlu o'r sefydlu i ddwyngo'r anodd yma. I first arrived at Sirus in 1967, the year of the Beatles' Lonie Hutt's club band and the Velvet Underground's Waiting for a Man. To my shame, I was at that stage an unreconstructed hippie and I thought of research as a way of putting off the time when I might have to do an honest job. I spent a lot of time in Sirus's JCR playing pinball with the Sinology students who also taught me to do the Times crossword. Sirus, in those days, was a crowded scruffy place. Its library was crammed into what is now the JCR, which is incredible. The presiding academics in Middle Eastern studies, Bernard Lewis, Ann Lampton, John Wonsborough and others, seemed to me brilliant teachers and ever so grand and quite terrifying. I was registered for a doctorate in Middle Eastern history, which I never finished, since I was appointed to an academic job without a doctorate and no convincing qualifications except for a plausible tongue. I don't feel too guilty about not finishing that doctorate since I eventually managed to publish almost all the research I'd managed to do, sandwiched between the pinball, the crossword and listening to the archers. In the Middle East, in the Middle Ages, the Battery Mamluq Sultanate 1250-1382, as well as in various subsequent articles. Even now, almost 50 years on, I am still publishing articles based on what I thought of as my idle years in the late 60s and early 70s. I don't know how it is in Malaysian, Chinese or Chechen studies, but my fellow students in the 60s were amazed by what research and publication opportunities were available to them. If they were historians, they could pick an empire, almost any empire, and have it to themselves as their specialist territory of expertise. It seems to me that that territory is still so thinly covered that the same is mostly the case today, but not the Abbasid empire which Hugh Kennedy has mostly taken over. Research projects in Middle Eastern studies are low hanging fruit, practically falling off the trees, and the bonuses that publishers are generally keen to publish anything on the Middle East or Islam. There is still a huge amount to do and it's fun doing it. After five years as an academic, I decided that I'd rather be a writer, and novels apart, I've written a string of books about the history and culture of the pre-modern Middle East. Consequently, in the decades that have followed, very nearly half a century, I have continued to haunt Suez's library. If the steelit has been designed as some kind of exorcism ritual, it's not going to work. I shall continue to haunt Suez, at least until my big book on Ibn Khaldun is finished. Thank you so much for this.