Search Results

“... Early in May, on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, Colin Powell met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Prime Minister, and separately with a small group of civil society activists, including Hanan Ashrawi and Mostapha Barghuti. According to Barghuti, Powell expressed surprise and mild consternation at the computerised maps of the settlements, the eight-metre-high wall, and the dozens of Israeli Army checkpoints that have made life so difficult and the future so bleak for Palestinians ...”

“... I had to take a customer down an alleyway to secretly sell him a book and we both knew we could go to jail, life had a taste to it.’ The first copy of Out of the Ashes he bought was an Arabic translation made in Beirut and smuggled into Iraq by a man called ‘Fadhel’, who other booksellers believed was later hanged. Haidar used a photocopier to make 50 ...”

“... Ali Shalal Qaissi, who may or may not be the hooded man of the Abu Ghraib photos. He met Najeeb Abbas Shami, who broke down in tears as he told his story; the Iraqi Chaldean Catholic Rami Khalid Mousa, who worked as an interpreter; and the Syrian businessman Ali Said. This gives him some perspective, and pre-empts any feeling of sameness, even if the ...”

“... were actually parts of Paterson’s own poetic line-up being ticked off for imagining they could go solo. While he was writing his earlier poems, he was also writing and touring as a guitarist with the lightning-fingered folk-jazz outfit Lammas, and the competitive tension of live performance crackles through the whole collection. Paterson’s narrator is a ...”

“... of Neolithic Britain? (Massingham, a long-out-of-print ruralist, envisaged Silbury and Cerne Abbas as pointers to a lost pagan Eden.) Equally, how did individual reputations fare? Harris loves to lean over one artist’s shoulder as he or she leans over another’s. And so, as she pores over Virginia Woolf’s posthumous reinterpretation of her friend ...”

“... the defender?’ My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: ‘If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make Israel safer. It’s the implementation of a government decision!’ Another interesting distinction between us and them came up when Hamas ...”

“... TVs and videos from the United Arab Emirates into Iran through the Iranian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas. It wasn’t long before another smuggling gang introduced him to a Pashtun Afghan from Kandahar called Uthman Salman Daoud, who asked Shahab for ‘all the weapons you can get’ and offered payment in drugs. Shahab told his story fluently and ...”

“... Afrouz as ‘a sleek, self-satisfied opportunist with a paunch’. The deputy press attaché, Abbas Lavasani, who was to be shot in the head and his body dumped outside the embassy door, thereby precipitating the SAS assault, is dismissed as a ‘spy’ and ‘fundamentalist fanatic’.Macintyre shows more empathy for the men who took over the ...”

“... record of the Indian Ocean region in this period.The embassy set sail from the port of Bandar Abbas, near the Hormuz Strait, and two weeks later arrived at the ‘strongly fortified’ and well-appointed port of Muscat. The ship paid a 3 per cent cargo tariff to moor for three days, collecting fresh water and provisions. Muhammad Rabi’ noted that ‘one ...”

“... state sanctities’. Overnight, the billboard vanished. It reflected, as the reformist journalist Abbas Abdi observed on Twitter, the ruling system’s ‘contradictory and blocked sensibility’, its wish to co-opt such women and its wish to impose morality policing at the same time.More than two hundred people have been killed since the protests began in ...”

“... February between General Mamdouh Shahin, a senior SCAF figure with a broad mandate, and General Abbas Kamel, the director of Sisi’s office, suggest the extent of military influence even over the corrupt fiefdom of the Interior Ministry. The recordings reveal that Shahin had contacted Mohammed Ibrahim, the interior minister, to discuss reclassifying the ...”

“... 877. They caught him off guard and the men of Wessex disorganised. He got away, but had to go into hiding, which is the reason he found himself, according to the legend, in the peasant’s hut brooding on the affairs of his kingdom – brooding so much he neglected the menial task given to him and burned the cakes. He showed proper ...”

“... 17th century, it seemed that the study of Arabic – as well as other languages, including Syriac, Ge’ez and Coptic – was a natural, even essential, continuation of this process. Scholars believed that a knowledge of these languages would enhance their understanding of Hebrew, but Arabic was also vital for missionary activity, which greatly intensified in ...”

“... the magnificently illustrated 13th-century Crusader Bible, which belonged to both Louis IX and Abbas the Great; the 15th-century Gospel Book made for an Ethiopian princess, which Greene coveted for a decade before the owner agreed to part with it; the printer’s proof of Eugénie Grandet, its typed text surrounded by tiny handwritten revisions spilling ...”

“... became Hizbullah’s leader in 1992, after Israel assassinated his predecessor, Sheik Abbas al-Musawi. He was 31 years old, and though he had been a leader in Hizbullah’s shura council for five years, he was little known outside the movement’s inner circles. To say that he proved more capable than al-Musawi is an understatement: Nasrallah was ...”