One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson review – freewheeling reflections on life, art and AI

One Thousand and One Nights is the framing device for the author’s pithy and thought provoking takes on everything from eugenics to trouser suits

In the framing device that opens the Middle Eastern folk tales collected in One Thousand and One Nights, King Shahryar avenges his wife’s infidelity by ordering her execution and marrying a new virgin every night, having each of them beheaded by sunrise so they won’t have time to cheat. When he runs out of victims, the young Persian queen Shahrazad volunteers but stalls her own murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another – and those become the stories we’re reading.

As Jeanette Winterson puts it in her new book – a dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the Nigh