“... picnic she takes to St James’s Park) or pointlessly accretive (‘A young man, tall as a stilt-walker and with the same stiff-legged gait, came and sat on the opposite bench. He put his motorcycle helmet on the ground. He ate a sandwich in four large bites. Something in his jacket crackled like a radio’). It seems unlikely that shy Nazneen would look at ...”

“... unfamiliar to him: he grew up in a similar place in the North of England, in the depressed area of Walker, where he was born on 20 August 1980. Paul was almost exactly a year older, and the brothers were always ‘the boys’. Their father, Jimmy Wakefield, died of a heart attack when Anthony was four; he’d been beaten up in the street one day and died in ...”

“... coffee plantations, and a handful threw in their lot with the FNLA. But the ethnic strains, which David Birmingham describes very well in his new history of Angola, were too great for this arrangement to last: in 1966 Jonas Savimbi, an ambitious and volatile character, left the FNLA to embark on a venture of his own, Unita (União Nacional para a ...”

“... top of everything else, she has a collapsing spine) and when she moved it was with the aid of a walker. But she came across more as a wounded soldier than a stricken old lady. When I went over the recording of our interview I noticed how full and precise her stories of her life were before her complex of conditions and how, as the narrative shifted to the ...”