Here's a fresh look on Rory

This is on his Places in Between. The arguments may come in handy if for some reason I start disliking him at one point:

The argument of this book is that the people of Afghanistan are aggressive, primitive savages, something less than real people, animals who need the civilising hand of foreign domination to bring them to the promised land - which seems to amount to something like the mid-Victorian British empire.

Stewart travels to 'unknown' places that writers have been describing for decades, and produces cliches in ranks - they only appear fresh to us because the writing style he copies is itself so dated that nobody else writes like that any more.