The cities of Arabia are all alike today; skyscrapers, fast roads, municipal greenery nourished at vast expense; a seafront called the Corniche, Al Kournaich, the Cornish Road. The joyless, oily sea is lined by vast amusement parks, where grave sheikhs and their male offspring test their nerve on the roller coasters; the women, in chaperoned parties, shop for furs and diamonds in vast glittering malls, in the Schönbrunns and Winter Palaces of the consumer’s art. … The pace of life is murderous. Each intersection has its little massacre.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 72