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“... to the U.S.’ – the ostensible subject of their conversation. We might take Shafi’s cue and go on to ask the equally important question that hangs unspoken in the air: ‘Will you, can you, do justice to us?’ Questioners who need to see themselves as professional and disinterested do not like to have the roles reversed, to become the objects of an ...”

“... with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which the snakes were raised. Otherwise more little snakes will be raised there.’ Shaked is a member of the settlers’ political party, Habayit Hayehudi (the Jewish Home), whose leader, Naftali Bennett, is Netanyahu’s ...”

“... Hollywood mystic M. Night Shyamalan; while the Cahiers critics’ top feature of 2002 (along with Abbas Kiarostami’s groundbreaking Ten) was Choses secrètes by Jean-Claude Brisseau, a veteran mystifier of female sexuality whose films recall 1970s-style luxury erotica with a lick of Marx and Nietzsche. But as for giving in to ‘listless market ...”

“... that he believed the change had begun in earnest in September 2003, after Arafat forced Mahmoud Abbas – a favoured figure in Washington – to resign as prime minister. Angry and frustrated, Bush called Blair. He complained that the Europeans ‘were dancing around Arafat’, while the US was left to do the ‘heavy lifting’ with Israel. Bush also ...”

“... Here, a domesticated Orpheus, he twangs his guitar: and listened to the notes I drew go echoing underground then somewhere in the afternoon the thrush’s quick reply – Is this ‘quick’ in the old sense of ‘alive’, or ‘quick’ because the thrush’s song is short, or because the protagonist’s eagerness for a response has blotted ...”

“... the world,’ said Nabil, a businessman who was sitting on a chair in the street watching voters go by. ‘He killed two people, both Iraqis. One of them was a mentally ill man everybody liked who’d never recovered from his son being killed in the Iran-Iraq war.’ A few hundred yards further down the road was a battered white kiosk where a middle-aged man ...”

“... Early in May, on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, Colin Powell met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Prime Minister, and separately with a small group of civil society activists, including Hanan Ashrawi and Mostapha Barghuti. According to Barghuti, Powell expressed surprise and mild consternation at the computerised maps of the settlements, the eight-metre-high wall, and the dozens of Israeli Army checkpoints that have made life so difficult and the future so bleak for Palestinians ...”

“... I had to take a customer down an alleyway to secretly sell him a book and we both knew we could go to jail, life had a taste to it.’ The first copy of Out of the Ashes he bought was an Arabic translation made in Beirut and smuggled into Iraq by a man called ‘Fadhel’, who other booksellers believed was later hanged. Haidar used a photocopier to make 50 ...”

“... Ali Shalal Qaissi, who may or may not be the hooded man of the Abu Ghraib photos. He met Najeeb Abbas Shami, who broke down in tears as he told his story; the Iraqi Chaldean Catholic Rami Khalid Mousa, who worked as an interpreter; and the Syrian businessman Ali Said. This gives him some perspective, and pre-empts any feeling of sameness, even if the ...”

“... were actually parts of Paterson’s own poetic line-up being ticked off for imagining they could go solo. While he was writing his earlier poems, he was also writing and touring as a guitarist with the lightning-fingered folk-jazz outfit Lammas, and the competitive tension of live performance crackles through the whole collection. Paterson’s narrator is a ...”

“... of Neolithic Britain? (Massingham, a long-out-of-print ruralist, envisaged Silbury and Cerne Abbas as pointers to a lost pagan Eden.) Equally, how did individual reputations fare? Harris loves to lean over one artist’s shoulder as he or she leans over another’s. And so, as she pores over Virginia Woolf’s posthumous reinterpretation of her friend ...”

“... the defender?’ My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: ‘If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make Israel safer. It’s the implementation of a government decision!’ Another interesting distinction between us and them came up when Hamas ...”

“... TVs and videos from the United Arab Emirates into Iran through the Iranian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas. It wasn’t long before another smuggling gang introduced him to a Pashtun Afghan from Kandahar called Uthman Salman Daoud, who asked Shahab for ‘all the weapons you can get’ and offered payment in drugs. Shahab told his story fluently and ...”

“... Afrouz as ‘a sleek, self-satisfied opportunist with a paunch’. The deputy press attaché, Abbas Lavasani, who was to be shot in the head and his body dumped outside the embassy door, thereby precipitating the SAS assault, is dismissed as a ‘spy’ and ‘fundamentalist fanatic’.Macintyre shows more empathy for the men who took over the ...”

“... record of the Indian Ocean region in this period.The embassy set sail from the port of Bandar Abbas, near the Hormuz Strait, and two weeks later arrived at the ‘strongly fortified’ and well-appointed port of Muscat. The ship paid a 3 per cent cargo tariff to moor for three days, collecting fresh water and provisions. Muhammad Rabi’ noted that ‘one ...”