He was a hugely influential academic, who found a way to make the institutional "counter-tribalism" (in John O'Sullivan's phrase) of America's elites pay off for him big time. His bestselling Orientalism is a deeply disingenuous work riddled with factual errors and with a selectivity of focus that negates its main claim. But it remains a stunningly successful example of how to parlay western self-loathing into bestseller status. Bumpity, bump, bump, bump.