On Monday 13 May, Dilwar Hussain of the Islamic Foundation led an evening seminar at King's College London, 'British Muslims: Identity, Integration and Policy'. Hussain is the well-respected head of the Policy Research Unit and Senior Research Fellow at the foundation, and also serves on the board of the Commission for Racial Equality in the UK. He's the co-author of British Muslims Between Assimilation and Segregation: Historical, Legal and Social Realities (2004) and has also written several op-eds, not least a rebuke to charges of extremism laid at the door of the Islamic Foundation by the BBC Panorama programme in 2005.

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I've mentioned Slavoj Žižek elsewhere before, and will doubtless do so again. The Slovenian polymath is both prolific and notorious, describing himself once as an 'orthodox Lacanian Stalinist' but he is of course much more than that. Žižek is one of those authors that makes me want to steal his books, such would one's intellectual armoury be augmented if one could actually grasp a significant fraction of the ideas he throws at the reader. Browsing in the university library yesterday I happened upon a copy of his 1997 Plague of Fantasies which includes a chapter entitled 'Cyberspace, Or, The Unbearable Closure of Being'.

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