The paper examines Edward Said's critique of Thomas Edward Lawrence view on Arabs and Arabian culture and society. On the one hand some of Said's allegations seems poorly grounded and can be deny with some excerpts from Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. On the other hand Said doesn't remark serious shortcomings of Lawrence's outlook of intercultural relations.

In the interview, Dipesh Chakrabarty gives an insight into recent transformations of historical thinking and writing. He discusses various faces of recent democratisation of history, like the proliferation of environmental history and the decolonialisation perspective. He outlines the genealogy of the term “provincializing”, known from his notable work Provincializing Eu-rope. Finally, he elaborates on the emergence of “the planetary” (or “a planetary age”) and recalls the contributions of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt on the conceptualisation of the issue.