Britishmen

Tom Paulin, 5 November 1981

Too Long a Sacrifice: Life and Death in Northern Ireland since 1969 
by Jack Holland.
Columbus, 217 pp., £7.95, July 1981, 0 396 07934 2
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A History of Northern Ireland 
by Patrick Buckland.
Gill and Macmillan, 195 pp., £3.95, April 1981, 0 7171 1069 9
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... 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 ...

Diary

Paul Seabright: What Explosion?, 1 November 2001

... 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 ...

Diary

Layla Al-Zubaidi: In Syria, 24 May 2012

... 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 ...

Show us your corpses

Sam Miller, 13 June 1991

... 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 ...

Diary

James Francken: British Jews, 1 November 2001

... 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 ...

Diary

Anatol Lieven: In Pakistan, 15 November 2001

... 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 ...

Short Cuts

Amjad Iraqi: From Gaza to Iran, 2 April 2026

... 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 ...

Beware the mattress

Andrew Cockburn: Mossad’s Kill List, 2 April 2026

Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign 
by Aviva Guttmann.
Cambridge, 336 pp., £25, August 2025, 978 1 009 50307 5
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... 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 ...

Short Cuts

Kevin Okoth: Kenya after Odinga, 20 November 2025

... 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 ...

America and Israel

Ian Gilmour, 18 February 1982

The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East 
by Mahmoud Riad.
Quartet, 365 pp., £11.95, October 1981, 0 7043 2297 8
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Palestinian Self-Determination 
by Hassan Bin Talal.
Quartet, 138 pp., £6.95, July 1981, 0 7043 2312 5
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This Year in Jerusalem 
by Kenneth Cragg.
Darton, Longman and Todd, 192 pp., £5.95, February 1982, 0 232 51524 7
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... 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 ...

Responses to the War in Gaza

LRB Contributors, 29 January 2009

... 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 ...

Baghdad’s Ruling Cliques

Keith Kyle, 15 August 1991

The Iraqi Revolution of 1958: The Old Social Classes Revisited 
edited by Robert Fernea and William Roger Louis.
Tauris, 232 pp., £35, May 1991, 1 85043 318 6
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Instant Empire: Saddam Hussein’s Ambition for Iraq 
by Simon Henderson.
Mercury House, 271 pp., £8.99, June 1991, 1 56279 007 2
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Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography 
by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi.
Brassey, 307 pp., £17.95, April 1991, 0 08 041326 9
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The Gulf Between Us: The Gulf War and Beyond 
edited by Victoria Brittain.
Virago, 186 pp., £5.99, June 1991, 1 85381 386 9
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Under Siege in Kuwait: A Survivor’s Story 
by Jadranka Porter.
Gollancz, 250 pp., £4.99, July 1991, 9780575051850
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... 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 ...

A Chance for the Irish Right

John Horgan, 21 April 1983

The Irish Labour Party in Transition 1957-82 
by Michael Gallagher.
Manchester, 326 pp., £19.50, January 1983, 0 7190 0866 2
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... 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 ...

Learning from Its Mistakes

Charles Glass: Hizbullah, 17 August 2006

... its perceived pro-Syrian stance. Now, Israel has rescued Hizbullah and made its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, not only the most popular man in Lebanon – but in the whole Arab world. An opinion poll commissioned by the Beirut Centre for Research and Information found that 80 per cent of Lebanese Christians supported ...

How Not to Invade

Patrick Cockburn: Lebanon, 5 August 2010

Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East 
by David Hirst.
Faber, 480 pp., £20, March 2010, 978 0 571 23741 8
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The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle 
by Michael Young.
Simon and Schuster, 295 pp., £17.99, July 2010, 978 1 4165 9862 6
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... 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 ...