“... Dover​ is popular with reporters on the prowl for Brexit stories. Border Force patrol ships – decked out with high-tech radar sensors and painted navy grey – hug the White Cliffs in pursuit of dinghies carrying immigrants from France: a defiant image of Britain repelling an external threat. From the top of one of the hills overlooking the town you look down on the Eastern Docks, where ten thousand lorries stream in and out every day, along with the hordes of cars and caravans and passengers on foot transported on P&O ferries to and from Calais ...”

“... On 22 May​ , Ahmed Mohsen, an unemployed taxi driver, left his house in the Islamic State-controlled western part of Mosul to try to escape across the Tigris to the government-held eastern side of the city. He and his mother, along with ten other people, carried rubber tyres down to the river: most of them couldn’t swim, and they planned to tie them together to make a raft ...”

“... When​ I first visited Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria, early in 2015, it was rapidly expanding. With the help of massive US air-power, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) had just retaken the city of Kobani from Islamic State. YPG fighters were linking together the Kurdish population centres south of the Syrian-Turkish frontier to create a de facto Kurdish state – they called it Rojava ...”

“... In​ the late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat at 90 Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington Station, to walk across Kensington Gardens to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. I wanted a visa to visit Iran, where the US raid to rescue staff held hostage in its embassy in Tehran had failed disastrously a few days earlier. As I walked, trying to work out what to say to the Iranian press attaché to persuade him to give me a visa, I didn’t at first notice that something odd was happening between the Serpentine and Princes Gate, where people were milling about and the police were setting up a cordon ...”

“... The centre of the book trade in Baghdad is al-Mutanabi Street, which runs between the Tigris and Rashid Street, now shabby and decayed but once the city’s commercial heart. The bookshops are small, and open all the time; on Friday there’s a market, when vendors lay out their books in Arabic and English on mats on the dusty and broken surface of the road ...”

“... Iraq​ has just had one of its least violent periods since the US invasion in 2003. Islamic State has been defeated: it lost its last town, Rawa, close to the Syrian border, on 17 November, and surviving IS fighters have retreated to hideouts in the western desert. In the past, IS would respond to military setbacks by putting on a show of strength and stepping up its bombing of easy-to-attack civilian targets ...”

“... The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria over the past 12 years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war. In each country, all or part of the opposition have been hard-core jihadi fighters ...”

“... America’s​ first act in the war on Iraq was an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein. In the early hours of the morning of 20 March 2003, forty cruise missiles were launched and bunker-buster bombs dropped on a compound on the outskirts of Baghdad where US intelligence wrongly believed him to be staying. Three years later a US airstrike succeeded in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, the organisation that would become Islamic State ...”

“... Northern Ireland​ is the most unstable part of the UK, where local battles escalate into draining crises for the British state. Although it has a reputation as a political volcano, between eruptions its internal dynamics are usually ignored in Britain and the Irish Republic. People in both countries are resentful that a place accounting for less than 3 per cent of the population of Britain and Ireland combined should play such a pivotal – and generally toxic – role in their affairs ...”

“... On the last page​ of his book about his father, Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions ...”

“... of those who caught it, the doctors knew of none that would make much difference. (In this book, Patrick Cockburn concludes that Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year still offers the soundest advice for those caught in epidemics: run away.) But although this was not Cork’s first epidemic, it was the most vicious. The death toll seems to have ...”

“... to judge from the views of journalists who’ve worked there since the invasion. Our own man Patrick Cockburn believes it’s a ‘great mistake to go with American units and report on any Iraqi city’ because local people can’t talk frankly in front of the military. But Cockburn is clearly outnumbered by ...”

“... fear and despise – and have often underestimated. These events came too late for inclusion in Patrick Cockburn’s book, but they follow the pattern he skilfully sets out in this complex account of the emergence of Muqtada al-Sadr, whom he sees as ‘the most important and surprising figure to emerge in Iraq since the US invasion’. Unusually among ...”

“... forces. Soleimani’s assassination has turned Iranian anger back towards the Great Satan. As Patrick Cockburn explains (in the next piece in this issue), Iran’s leaders were astounded by the millions of mourners who turned out in the streets. Thanks to Trump, a regime that had become increasingly estranged from its own people saw extra­ordinary ...”

“... fighters heading east from northern Syria captured Mosul. Islamic State​ came out of Iraq, as Patrick Cockburn explains: the movement initially called the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), then the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis) or in Iraq and the Levant (Isil), had roots in al-Qaida in Iraq, which, under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, waged sectarian war ...”