“... state was now the devout and ruthless soldier, Omar al-Bashir, who ruled in uneasy alliance with Hassan al-Turabi, the charismatic leader of the country’s Islamist party. With the Islamists in power, the Darfur regional government tried to compensate for the rarity with which it caught criminals by the savagery of the ...”

“... of Ireland. The Gibraltar equivalent of Sir Joseph Cairns is a politician called Sir Joshua Hassan who believes that the Rock is indissolubly part of the United Kingdom. Although Jack Holland ignores Cairns’s rich insight, he does explore the confused nature of Loyalist identity. In a revealing anecdote he describes ...”

“... completed just before the uprising began but the lobby café was empty. No tourists. There, I met Hassan Abbas, a writer who knows everyone. Over the past decade he’s had articles censored, a cinema club closed down, a programme of debates banned. Now he thinks things may be looking up. He believes that what the regime ...”

“... a surreal story on its front page. One of those who had died in the explosion was a man called Hassan Jandoubi, an employee at the factory, who was, according to Le Figaro, a known Islamist sympathiser. He had had an argument the day before with some colleagues when he objected to their displaying an American flag in ...”

“... and cake in the military control-room in the Army cantonment in Chittagong. Major-General Mahmudul Hassan was explaining what had happened. ‘More than fifty thousand people have been drowned in a tidal wave. There are dead bodies everywhere.’ Turning to the diplomats, he said: ‘We need your help.’ A photographer ...”

“... different. Invoking the assassinations of the Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar, and Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah, as well as the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, Netanyahu told Israelis in a video address last month that ‘we have an organised plan with many surprises to destabilise the [Iranian] regime and enable ...”

“... assassins shot a man in Norway whom they believed to be one of Munich’s chief planners, Ali Hassan Salameh. In fact, the victim was a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, who had been living peacefully in Lillehammer for the previous nine years and was killed as he walked home from the cinema with his Norwegian wife, who ...”

“... by Hezbollah activists and taken to Beirut. Tannenbaum’s story is not clear-cut. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary-General of Hezbollah, has claimed that he was a Mossad agent and that his kidnapping should come under the rubric of counter-espionage; there have been suggestions in one or two Arab papers that he ...”

“... remarkably flexible when it comes down to accepting government jobs and forming alliances. Munawar Hassan, the Jamaat’s secretary general, rather prided himself on the Party’s tactical opportunism when I spoke to him. He also made clear that while the Jamaat condemns the current air campaign, its version of an Islamic ...”

“... Tanzania a similar law, passed in 2015, has been used to silence critics of President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi party. (Hassan has herself taken an increasingly autocratic turn; hundreds of people were reportedly killed during ...”

“... or for its adamant refusal of self-determination to the Palestinians – a right to which Prince Hassan of Jordan, in his learned and judicious examination of the legal problems, shows they are fully entitled. The apt epigraph to his book is Pope’s couplet: Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none ...”

“... Prophet’s grandson, killed by an overwhelming military force at Kerbala. The speeches given by Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s secretary general, were avidly followed; the ceremony of Ashura drove home the message of martyrdom and sacrifice. Islamists are likely to conclude from Gaza that Arab regimes backed by the US ...”

“... than they habitually posed to it?’ He doesn’t quite go along with the postwar claim made by Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizbullah, that his fighters had won a ‘divine victory’, transforming Lebanon, one of the ‘small’ states of the Middle East, into one of its ‘great powers’. But he has no ...”

“... are, when not repetitious, not quite compatible. Moreover, although Saddam was related to General Hassan al-Bakr, his predecessor in the Presidency, he was not his nephew. The questions that arise after reading these three books are how Saddam emerged as the ultimate successor of Nuri and what light this throws on the ...”

“... parties (one composed, paradoxically, of ‘independents’), both swearing allegiance to King Hassan, and a tiny socialist party on the fringe of political life. Elsewhere in Africa you will find, without searching too hard, countries in which national liberation continues – long after it has been achieved – to ...”