User:Arms & Hearts/Seventy-two Virgins

Seventy-Two Virgins is a comic political thriller novel by the British politician Boris Johnson, first published in 2004.

Composition
Johnson said in 2004 that he had written the novel as an exercise in "pure vanity" and "just to see that I could." At the time of publication he was

Plot summary
A group of Islamic terrorists conceal themselves in an ambulance in order to launch an attack on the Palace of Westminster during a state visit by the President of the United States. Roger Barlow, a Conservative Member of Parliament who is worried about the exposure of a sex scandal by the press, becomes unwittingly involved in events.

Critical reception and interpretation
In The Sunday Times, Roland White compared the novel's humour to the work of Tom Sharpe, described the book as "polished" and observed that it "even raises, possibly by accident, an interesting ethical question", namely whether television broadcasters give publicity to a terrorist attack similar to that described in the novel, were one to occur. Quentin Letts, in the Evening Standard, described the novel as "fluent, funny material", estimated that "there is a good, out-loud laugh to be had every 10 pages", and concluded that Seventy-Two Virgins is "assembled with skill and terrific energy and will lift morale in the soul of many a fair-minded Englishman."

Reading Seventy-Two Virgins in the context of the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election, Mark Lawson noted that "the novel is fundamentally undiplomatic; few readers would seem likely to come to the conclusion that the author would or should subsequently become UK [[Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
 * foreign secretary]]." Lawson finds the novel to contain negative depictions of French people, anti-Americanism and sexist attitudes, and comments that "Johnson's fictional style is so undisciplined – moving in and out of viewpoints, into which a boomingly familiar authorial voice often intrudes for several pages – that it is impossible to separate him from all, or even many, of the ideologically provocative comments." Lawson identifies the Barlow character as an alter ego of Johnson, and observes that the character displays a "startling political and spiritual nihilism" which raises the question of whether "Johnson's campaign team should have found and quietly destroyed all extant copies of Seventy-Two Virgins."

Fintan O'Toole in The New York Review of Books and Alex Marshall of The New York Times, also both writing in the context of Johnson's leadership campaign, similarly identified similarities between the novel's protagonist and Johnson himself. O'Toole criticised Johnson as racist and compared him to Donald Trump.

Commercial reception
As of July 2019, the novel had sold more than 46,000 copies.

Significance
Johnson's biographer Sonia Purnell said that Seventy-Two Virgins was invaluable to her research on his life, and described it as "quite telling."