“... be converted into a strength. ‘If you want to beat Mike Tyson, you don’t invite him into the ring, you invite him to the chessboard,’ Husam Zomlot, the brash young deputy of Fatah’s Department of Foreign Relations, explained to me. ‘On Nakba Day a thousand people marched to Qalandia. Once we manage to get 100,000 people marching there, let’s see ...”

“... of its strengths and weaknesses would be more useful.) Some say it ended after Black September in Jordan in 1970; others that it ended in 1975 at the start of the Lebanese civil war. The majority see Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which brought about the comprehensive destruction of the PLO’s infrastructure, as having killed it off. The ...”

“... war with Iraq), has advocated the ethnic cleansing (‘transfer’) of the Palestinians across the Jordan; and in 1996 Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (now a senior official at the Pentagon) advised Binyamin Netanyahu to abandon the Oslo Peace Process and return to military repression of the Palestinians. It’s far more probable, therefore, that most members ...”

“... Shakespearean, like the carters in Henry IV fed up with the fleas in the inn which breed because a jordan isn’t provided and they have to leak in the chimney. In his memoirs Anthony Powell – Henry Yorke’s friend both at school and Oxford – comments on his ‘deep interest in the eternal contrast between everyday life’s flatness and its ...”

“... toward disaster. Al-naqba.’ But perhaps there is a solution: ‘He felt the need to expand. Into Jordan, Lebanon, the Sinai . . . He had two women, he loved them both, and he could not, would not, imagine it otherwise.’ All Sam needs is to persuade his ex of this. He phones her: ‘Look at Israel. I mean, we’re supposed to be with one ...”

“... casualties. Meanwhile, he prepared his demands from a defeated Britain: Malta, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, British Somaliland. Increasingly, however, he came to feel that the only thing that would get Italy taken seriously – would, indeed, confirm its (and his) virility – was a bold stroke: a declaration of war and a lightning invasion which, with ...”

“... Islamists in Egypt and other pro-Western ‘moderate’ alliance states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan have noted Israel’s wanton disregard for the deaths of civilians in its desire to crush Hamas. They have seen the barely concealed pleasure of the regimes that run those states. The message is clear: the struggle for the future of this region is going to ...”

“... on its head. Arafat’s cohort of ageing PLO leaders, men-of-action who had been pushed from Jordan to Lebanon to Tunisia, were slow to understand how deeply this reversal would be resented by Palestinians outside the territories, just as they were slow to recognise how independent and self-reliant the population of ‘endurers’ had become in the ...”

“... activists of his age could have conceived, having watched his PLO comrades being driven out of Jordan after the events of Black September, to regroup for the most part in Lebanon. At the Sorbonne Khoury wrote his dissertation on the Lebanese civil strife of 1840-60, a period of Druze/Maronite rivalry inflamed by Ottoman rule. It struck him how little had ...”

“... played with, as you would with a slot machine. A marble could be dropped in one corner and would ring bells until it zigzagged to the bottom. Others are conceptual playthings, based on the idea of the remains of a toy; Forgotten Game is the title of one box made to look ruined. Even those which have no apparent mechanisms for play, past or present, can be ...”

“... partly to escape the dissipations of Great Neck (the model for Gatsby’s West Egg), described by Ring Lardner as ‘a continuous round of parties … covering pretty nearly 24 hours a day’. From their villa in San Raphaël, Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins: ‘I feel an enormous power in me now, more than I’ve ever had.’ The novel was finished in August but ...”

“... as schematic as it gets: here is the put-upon wife, the autocratic husband, the tiger and wedding ring and ‘feminine art’ of needlework encumbered with symbolism. True, Rich wasn’t the only poet parroting Frost and Yeats and Auden in those days. Nearly all the young poets of the age strove for formal competence: Lowell, Merwin, Plath and even Frank ...”

“... cause. A play on ‘criminology’, it sounds like a joke in English and has the same semi-serious ring in French. But in 1995 it gained semi-official recognition when Jacques Chirac, responding to that year’s terrorist attacks, came up with the notion of a psychological emergency as something the state had to be ready for. By the time of the Toulouse ...”

“... QAnon cult, who believe in the existence of an elite, Satanic, cannibalistic child-sex-trafficking ring, and who see Trump as their saviour. This rightwards drift culminated in a protest in Berlin in August 2020, when a faction led by QAnon followers attempted to storm the Reichstag.The profound shock of the pandemic was clearly a trigger for these events, but ...”

“... in currency. It signified Arafat’s unilateral appointment of favourite supporters from Tunisia, Jordan or the Gulf to positions in ministries, security groups and other similar jobs without regard for merit or for the sacrifices made by many competent West Bankers during the intifada. ‘Don’t forget the army of one million colonels,’ Wadie added with a ...”