“... have treated Huggins with more respect. 11 January. Picture in the Guardian of an American soldier manning a gun in Baghdad, stencilled on the front of the gun a death’s head. That’s why the war is lost. 25 January. I’ve taken to eating the occasional date, though it’s not a fruit I wholly like. Mam used to eat them when we were little, bought in small ...”

“... rage’, his ‘calm, generous and open’ mother ‘a born peacemaker’ – left a two-fold mark on him: on the one hand, acquiring as a baby ‘the rock-bottom security that came from being unconditionally loved by his mother’, who bore him when she was 38; on the other, learning as a boy from the spectacle of his father the need for ‘strategies of ...”

“... office, which was directly opposite, took up the game, with generally poor results. Olivia Manning, loosely disguised as Harriet in The Balkan Trilogy, provides this commentary:She walked … across the square into the Calea Victoriei and, passing through the parrot-land of the Gypsy flower-sellers, reached the British Propaganda Bureau. No one was ...”

“... lead his brother to safety but the police wouldn’t let him. They had set up a cordon and were manning it, their faces full of panic. A crowd of young Muslim boys just back from the mosque were agitating to get past. Omar looked up and could see that the flames were almost in their flat. ‘I want to speak to the family,’ Mohammad said and Omar’s heart ...”