’This book is an extraordinary achievement. Kabesh manages at once to convey the overlapping histories of British and Egyptian masculinities and their distinct character. Interweaving autobiography - her own and others’ - history, psychoanalysis, fiction, sociology and ethnography, Kabesh troubles masculinity, while exploring its complex investments and our investments in it. This text unsettles our assumptions about men, about cultural difference, and about how we relate to one another at the profoundest level.’ Clare Hemmings, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK ’Amal Treacher Kabesh has written a remarkable and timely book. Rooted in her family experience, in political history and in psychosocial studies, it lovingly and yet excoriatingly interrogates contemporary emotional life. Her account of Egyptian and British masculinities provides an incisive analysis of what it means, as Eastern or Western subjects, to live in the shadow of the other.’ Stephen Frosh, Birkbeck College, UK