“... One of the most baffling things about America,’ Amiri Baraka wrote in 1963, ‘is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here.’ Perhaps, he wondered, ‘it is because of the vileness, or call it adversity, that such beauty does exist.’ Baraka made the observation in his liner notes to John Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, which includes ‘Alabama’, an elegy for the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing ...”

“... Before​ the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs. Parisians have returned to the streets, and to their cafés, with the same commitment to normality that the Lebanese have almost miraculously exhibited since the mid-1970s ...”

“... During the long, bewildering week in which Egyptians waited for the results of their presidential election to be announced, I took a train from Cairo to Alexandria. The Muslim Brotherhood had declared that its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, had defeated Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s last prime minister, by a million votes. The Brothers had collected signed tallies from all 16,000 polling stations, and their counts were said to be meticulous ...”

“... Hassan Nasrallah’s death was announced on Saturday, 28 September, the anniversary of the death of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the father of Pan-Arabism. Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, three years after his humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War, the ‘naksah’ or setback that led to Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai ...”

“... Before​ he went on his mass killing spree in 2011, Anders Behring Breivik was a regular at the Palace Grill in Oslo West. He looked harmless: another blond man trying to chat up women at the bar. ‘He came across as someone with a business degree,’ one woman recalled, ‘one of those West End boys in very conservative clothes.’ Indeed he had tried his hand at business, though he’d never completed a degree, or much of anything else ...”

“... The awakening is not over, but the heady days of the Arab Spring have come to an end. The counter-revolution, Régis Debray once observed, is revolutionised by the revolution. And so it has been. In Syria, protests have degenerated into sectarian warfare, fomented by a thuggish ruling clique that seems ready to bring the entire country down with it ...”

“... Mesopotamia was paradise. This is the Garden of Eden, said one; it is from this country that Adam was driven forth – give us a good government and we will make this country flourish. For us Mesopotamia is a home, a national home to which the Jews of Bombay and Persia and Turkey will be glad to come. Baghdad’s Jews failed to grasp that the rules of ...”

“... Michel Houellebecq​ ’s novel about a Muslim takeover of France is a melancholy tribute to the pleasure of surrender. It’s 2022, a charismatic Islamist politician called Mohammed Ben Abbes has become president, and France has fallen under his spell. Houellebecq’s timing could hardly have been better: Soumission was published on 7 January, the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre ...”

“... In​ 1973, Harold Hering, a decorated Vietnam War rescue pilot, was studying at Vandenberg Air Force Base to become a missile launch officer, a member of an elite group charged with executing the order to launch a nuclear strike. The responsibility was immense, but Hering was persuaded that, at the crew level, there were enough checks and balances to guard against rash behaviour on the part of any individual ...”

“... The night​ before the midterms, I reread The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer’s account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon. ‘Brood on that country who expresses our will,’ Mailer wrote:She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child – no one knows if legitimate – and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen ...”

“... In late July​ , HBO unveiled plans for a new show set in an alternative reality, in which the Confederate South, led by General Robert E. Lee, has successfully seceded from the Union. D.B. Weiss, one of the producers of Confederate, explained the thinking behind the series: ‘What would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked DC, if the South had won – that just always fascinated me ...”

“... It’s a good time to be a Muslim writing about ‘the trouble with Islam’, to borrow the title of a recent jeremiad by Irshad Manji, a Pakistani-Canadian lesbian feminist. Readers in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom ...”

“... In the early 1970s, Israeli officials began to take note of a disquieting phenomenon: the rise in pro-Palestinian sentiment on the European left, which in the aftermath of the Holocaust had been largely supportive of the Jewish state. The French youths who had declared ‘we are all German Jews’ after the arrest of the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose German Jewish parents had fled to France in 1933, were now protesting against the Israeli occupation – Cohn-Bendit among them ...”

“... writing, from Wrong to Gérard Prunier, from Howard French to Jason Stearns, to say nothing of Adam Hochschild’s study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose ...”

“... Who could resist the charms, or doubt the importance, of a liberal, secular, Turkish Muslim writing formally adventurous, learned novels about the passionate collision of East and West? Orhan Pamuk is frequently described as a bridge between two great civilisations, and his major theme – the persistence of memory and tradition in Westernising, secular Turkey – is of a topicality, a significance, that it seems churlish to deny ...”