“... the general rise of British clutter.* Mass Observation had been asking people to describe their homes. ‘Carol Daniel,’ Sandbrook writes, was a 29-year-old Tesco shelf-stacker, living at an end of terrace house in Havering, Essex, with her husband and children. Their living room has an armchair, an orange three-section sofa, a birdcage, a fish tank and a ...”

“... intelligence must all be home-grown. Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister, told me that the Iraqi army recently found a workshop capable of turning out seventy cars rigged to explode every day. He was expecting an attack on his ministry, a tall white building in the centre of Baghdad, and had just moved into a new house after a vehicle packed with nearly a ...”

“... it had something to do with the inadequacy of the old ways that governed our lives in our real homes, where we felt lonely, isolated and unable to form the connections we ...”

“... by both houses and the military (a quarter of the seats in the Hluttaw are reserved for the army, a provision of the 2008 constitution intended to help it retain its grip on power). Aung San Suu Kyi herself can’t become president: anyone with a foreign spouse or children is barred (her two sons are British citizens, as was her late husband). The ...”

“... whose employers ‘required her silence about her previous life’. She cleans other people’s homes and sheathes her own furniture in plastic, to keep off the dirt and dust. Her unswerving rhythms and routines are an attempt to protect her from the drift of life. But Messud sets the slow passage of the decades against the immediacy of the moment, subtly ...”

“... From east Atatra to Salatin Street. From west [unclear] to Jabalia Camp. You must evacuate your homes immediately and head toward southern Jabalia town along the following road: Falluja Road, until 12 noon, Sunday 13 July 2014. The IDF does not intend to harm you or your families. These operations are temporary and will be of short duration. Any ...”

“... Children are nowhere to be seen these days. Nor are their parents, who go to and from their homes in sleek SUVs with clouded windows. The only people you see on the streets are domestics, pushing prams or walking dogs, and gardeners, Mexican and Central American. It’s a much wealthier neighbourhood than it was, and the wealth is on display. A young ...”

“... whose capacity to earn money or travel has been greatly curtailed since Oslo; whose land and homes are under constant threat; and whose life under Chairman Arafat’s dreadful Authority (buttressed by CIA and Mossad support) has become a nightmare. At least it was possible to render in images the tiny bit of territory – about 3 per cent – controlled ...”

“... are neither here nor there. They go off upright or horizontally, in Chevrolets and nursing homes, in bathtubs, on the interstates, in ERs, ORs, BMWs. And while it may be that we assign more equipment or more importance to deaths that create themselves in places marked by initials – ICU being somehow better than Greenbriar Convalescent Home – it is ...”

“... Brisbane, and he’d run out of money. It was 3 a.m. A few months earlier he’d handed in his ATM card in an attempt to control his addiction. He’d arranged with the bank that he could only withdraw cash over the counter, during business hours. And now he was broke, living in a dosshouse, and desperate for some money so he could continue playing pokie ...”

“... parts of the Japanese war effort’ was not true: they had deliberately been aimed at people’s homes.The Harper’s article was so successful in instilling the notion of a million lives saved that dissenting statements, even from eminent military authorities, failed to gain traction. ‘The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no ...”

“... which wasn’t surprising given that half the Syrian population have been forced to leave their homes in the last decade. I remember one show in which a Damascus housewife meets an expat on Facebook and dreams of joining him in Austria. The man sends a video of the streets and markets in an Alpine town. ‘There are no Syrians or Arabs,’ he tells her in a ...”

“... Bank. For many children this is the only time they get to visit the seaside, even though their homes in the Occupied Territories may be no more than twenty or thirty kilometres away. There are draconian restrictions on the movement of Palestinians living in the West Bank (the residents of Gaza live in an open-air prison of their own). Yet every ...”

“... committed to defending other republics, which set out to retake Rome for the pope; a French army disembarked at the port of Civitavecchia on 25 April.Thousands gathered to defend the city and the dream of a nation-state. The most prominent was Giuseppe Garibaldi. A seaman by trade, he had been sentenced to death for insurrection in 1834 and spent years ...”

“... next to the school.’ Adil is under attack by the Shia militiamen of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army; they now hold Hurriyah, which used to be a mixed district. The Jadriyah district of east Baghdad, which lies in a loop of the Tigris, is almost entirely Shia but is considered one of the safer areas – not that this is saying a great deal. I stay here when ...”