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“... her own image when she went to New York on holiday two days after Hurricane Katrina. It didn’t go well. She was booed by an audience at Spamalot, and dressed down by a fellow shopper at Ferragamo on Fifth Avenue. ‘I just didn’t get it, frankly,’ Rice tells her biographer. ‘In Washington parlance,’ Bumiller explains, ‘Rice was staying in her ...”

“... posters, the determination, the courage. My neighbours in New Mezzeh are mainly pious Sunnis. They go to the mosque to pray, but they’re not Islamists. People’s energy is amazing. They were singing in the mosque. It’s unheard of to sing in a mosque.’ I went to Old Mezzeh the next morning. The two killed at the previous day’s funeral were buried at ...”

“... for the national security adviser Muhammad Dahlan, with the at least tacit backing of Mahmoud Abbas, to succumb to American blandishments and try to mount an armed putsch against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Whether Hamas pre-empted this with a coup of their own, or whether Fatah made the first move, is ultimately irrelevant. Neither movement was able to see ...”

“... of poison on unsuspecting pedestrians in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu liked what he saw, and gave Yatom the go-ahead. He was not dissuaded by Hamas’s proposal for a 30-year hudna (truce), relayed by King Hussein on 22 September in a letter delivered by hand to the secret Mossad station at the Israeli embassy in Amman. Three days later, a pair of Mossad agents ...”

“... the border. Arabs who are now being evicted from their homes say the Kurds are telling them to ‘go back to the desert’. For the 2.2 million Syrian Kurds, a tenth of the Syrian population, the capture of Tal Abyad has enabled them to connect two of their three enclaves, which they call Rojava, or West Kurdistan. The largest enclave, or canton as the Kurds ...”

“... poses of courtiers: she is much less glamorous in the portrait in European dress in the Shah Abbas exhibition at the British Museum, though the pistol she holds there tells one that she was a goer. In the case of the Earl of Denbigh, shown full length, it is his pink, gold-striped pyjama suit that is striking, as he is caught, fowling-piece in ...”

“... The Israelis found this out in Lebanon in 1992 when they assassinated Hizbullah’s leader, Abbas Musawi, only to find that his replacement, Hassan Nasrallah, was an even more formidable adversary. Second, the Israelis can invade Gaza and take it over. The IDF could do this fairly easily, topple Hamas and put an end to the rocket fire from Gaza. But ...”

“... from Arafat’s tomb – now scattered across Europe like the relics of a medieval saint – will go on being the subject of this bizarre political-scientific battle, in which the credibility and expertise of all the teams are perpetually cast into doubt. The removal of the keffiyeh to Lausanne was only a temporary setback for the creators of the Arafat ...”

“... the book was a gift for the shrine of St Peter from ‘Ceolfridus, Anglorum extimis de finibus abbas’ (‘Ceolfrith, abbot from the far-away lands of the Angles’). For the exhibition, the manuscript has returned to the far-away lands of the Angles for the first time in 1300 years. The Life of Ceolfrith also tells us that the abbot originally ...”

“... also by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas], who have no problem with also eulogising terrorists.’ The message was clear. For Israel, there are ‘terrorists’ with whom no negotiation for peace can be made. Then there is Abu Mazen, who ‘eulogises’ terrorists and therefore cannot be a partner ...”

“... A photograph of Abbas Kiarostami in Hamid Dabashi’s book shows him crouching over a frying pan that has two eggs in it. Beside him, and like him focused on the eggs, is the original movie camera invented by Lumière. The photograph was taken during the shooting of Lumière et compagnie, a film which, on the 100th anniversary of Lumière’s invention, enlisted film-makers from all over the world to make one-minute shorts using the original camera ...”

“... a front garden stacked with boxes and dead computer parts, journalists and visitors come and go, mobiles ablaze. The building is on loan as an HQ to the Association Collectif Liberté Egalité Fraternité Ensemble Unis. The acronym is much less ponderous: ACLEFEU, pronounced ‘assez le feu’ or ‘no more burning’. From here the members of the ...”

“... was afraid of annexing the Territories, with their huge Arab population, but could not let them go; the Palestinians were desperate enough to agree to a binational state within which they could erode Jewish domination. Ethnic cantons might solve the problem of representation, with Jerusalem as a federal city, while the refugees would be resettled in the ...”

“... between a ‘democratic’ France and a ‘democratic’ Algeria rather than independence. Ferhat Abbas was in difficulty with the militants in his own party, the Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien, and had to assure them he was in favour of independence, but believed in revolution by legal, peaceful means, and was opposed to co-operation with the ...”

“... attempted to appease the anger of the Qom mullahs by imprisoning his urbane Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, the Shah flew out of Tehran without bothering to order Hoveyda’s release, leaving the old man to face Khalkhali’s courts. When offered the chance, Hoveyda refused to run away and was sentenced to death as a ‘doer of mischief on ...”