The weekly also looks ahead to Thailand’s December 23 general election. Since the then prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, was overthrown in a coup in September 2006, his Thai Rak Thai party has reappeared as the People Power Party. Shinawatra is still barred from returning to Thailand but the PPP carries his trademark agenda, primarily making itself appealing with the promise of cheap loans and healthcare. The question is, if the PPP does, as per predictions, win, how will the generals react to moves to bring Shinawatra back?

Vanity Fair’s January issue takes a recently discovered map by T.E. Lawrence (or, Lawrence of Arabia) in which he proposed a post-Ottoman partition plan for the Middle East. Submitted to the British government in 1918, it foresaw “Irak” as being made up of separate Kurdish and Arabic states. Vanity Fair invited four regional hands - David Fromkin, Dennis Ross, Kenneth Pollack and Daniel Byman - to get them to map their Middle East. Their social and cultural landscape has 14 entities, including Balochistan, Tetrapolis (which has the cities of Aleppo, Damascus, Amman and Gaza), Kurdistan, the Levant and the Crescent (on the northern parts of the Persian Gulf to include ethnically Arab Shias). Anticipating criticism, the map-makers say their exercise is descriptive, not prescriptive.