One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson review freewheeling reflections on life, art and AI

"When he runs out of victims, the young Persian queen Shahrazad volunteers but stalls her own murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another and those become the stories we're reading. As Jeanette Winterson puts it in her new book a dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the Nights Shahrazad's feat of creativity refuses the present emergency the contrived drama of a powerful man."

"A better story starts with a better story, she writes. Reason will not win the day. Without imagination nothing changes. Each chapter opens with a pithy retelling of one of Shahrazad's tales, spritzed with 21st-century idiom (The Vizier has no manosphere where he can vent), before giving way to wide-ranging reflections on anything and everything, from the history of eugenics, to 13th-century Mali, to the awfulness of the trouser suits preferred by some CEO types and lots of female politicians."

"As opinions on matters big and small fly past, the tone evokes by turns a party political broadcast, Radio 4's Thought for the Day, an old friend setting the world to rights. A global economy that works for the many is not a childish dream There's always enough money for a weapons factory. A brisk analysis of the misogyny of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte concludes that it's pointless to cancel dead artists (We're not marrying them)."

Shahrazad stalls her execution by telling captivating tales that transform a lethal power-play into sustained narrative survival. That creative act models how storytelling can challenge authoritarian spectacle and sustain progressive hope amid rising radical-right violence. Retellings of Nights tales appear in contemporary idiom and expand into reflections on history, politics, philosophy, and culture. Topics range from eugenics and 13th-century Mali to the aesthetics of trouser suits and the misogyny of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte. The tone shifts between political broadcast, devotional reflection, and intimate counsel. Imagination, not reason alone, is essential to political and social change.

Read at www.theguardian.com