Seton Dearden, A Nest of Corsairs: The Fighting Karamanlis of the Barbary Coast ('the Karamanli Bashaws of Tripoli in Barbary and their relations with the States, the Consuls and the travellers of the Christian Powers, 1711 to 1835')

There's quite a difference between the headline title of this book and the subtitle. It's rather unfair to print 'A Nest of Corsairs' on the front cover, with images of scoundrel pirates and derring-do on the Barbary coast, and then 5 pages in reveal that it's actually about Libyan Foreign policy in the 18th Century.  Quite dry stuff, and I didn’t take much of it in, beyond the occasional breathtaking aside from the author concerning 'the oriental mind', which appeared to cover everyone that lives east of Athens or south of Sicily. It was written in the 1940s though, so is maybe just of its time. I think it's the sort of attitude Edward Said was talking about in 'Orientalism', but that book is just as impenetrable as 'Midnight's Children' to me.  The trouble with all these books about Orientals is that they all look alike. . .