“... the 2006 war, he told me, Israeli strikes had destroyed 130 houses – people didn’t want to go through that again. ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen,’ he said. ‘No one came and told us what to do. We don’t know if we should stay or leave, parents don’t know what to do with the children. It’s like the last war, and we are caught in ...”

“... Israel; and Israel saw him as a troublemaker, if not a traitor. Shortly after the murder, Mahmoud Abbas declared Juliano a shaheed, a martyr. But though he may have given his life to the Palestinian cause, he was not killed by an Israeli bullet. The man who shot him was Palestinian, and probably from the camp: no one else would have known how to navigate ...”

“... aid package for Sudan goes directly to the RSF, though one of its commanders, Abbas Abdulaziz, recently complained on German television that his work is underfunded by European states – which isn’t the same as not being funded at all. The militarisation of large sections of North Africa has been a bonanza for the global security ...”

“... in this region is deeper and wider than that of any other writer,’ the Egyptian writer Ahmad ‘Abbas Salih told him. Fanon, alert to the transformation that had caused Sartre to replace the abstract ‘self’ and ‘other’ of Being and Nothingness (1943) with a new understanding of power relations in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), based in part ...”

“... became Hizbullah’s leader in 1992, after Israel assassinated his predecessor, Sheik Abbas al-Musawi. He was 31 years old, and though he had been a leader in Hizbullah’s shura council for five years, he was little known outside the movement’s inner circles. To say that he proved more capable than al-Musawi is an understatement: Nasrallah was ...”

“... the background. The thumping noise continues. The three men appear from the right of the screen, go round to the back of the car. Cut to a view of the boot of the car, followed by a short, slow tracking movement to bring us closer to it. A reverse angle shot shows the three men. De Niro nods to Liotta, Pesci takes a broad butcher’s knife from his belt, the ...”

“... des Congrès in the pouring rain, umbrella in hand – a little wink to Gene Kelly. The show will go on! His selection grows larger every year (so, too, does the number of films being produced). He has added the Cannes Classics section – for restorations of heritage works, the only reliable strand to the programme – and Cannes Premiere, the function of ...”

“... After all, who didn’t go through the most improbable adventure during the civil war? Mikhail Bulgakov, Black Snow When a Lebanese wants your attention, he lowers his voice. You draw closer, and he asks: ‘Do you want to hear a story?’ If you say yes, and everyone does, you’re hooked. You listen. In the most Lebanese of his novels, Little Mountain, Elias Khoury tells a story about stories ...”

“... leaving Israel was no small humiliation: Jews who emigrate are known as yordim, those who ‘go down’ (immigrants make aliyah and ‘ascend’). In ‘going down’, the Netanyahu boys had to postpone their entrance into the army, their keenest aspiration: both Yoni and Bibi were determined to wash the shame of their bookish father, a prophet outcast ...”

“... are likely to conclude from Gaza that Arab regimes backed by the US and some European states will go to any lengths in their struggle against Islamism. Many Sunni Muslims will turn to the salafi-jihadists, al-Qaida included, who warned Hamas and others about the kind of punishment being visited on them now. Mainstream movements such as the Muslim ...”

“... an idea that enjoyed support in Cairo. There was no love lost between Istiqlal and the guerrillas: Abbas Messaâdi, a former Istiqlal member who had broken away to form the ALN, was murdered in 1956. For their part, ALN commanders hadn’t been keen on the fledgling technocrats who ran Istiqlal to begin with, and didn’t trust the new leadership that emerged ...”

“... after a short interval by another National Conference puppet, this time a renegade communist, G.M. Sadiq, whose no less repressive regime proceeded to wind up the party altogether, dissolving it into Congress.Abdullah, meanwhile, sat in an Indian prison for 12 years, eventually on charges of treason, with two brief intermissions in 1958 and 1964. During ...”