“... tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he was spending more time away, Rania would send him loving messages ...”

“... North Africa, she united several powerful tribes and succeeded in defeating the mighty forces of Hassan ibn al-Nu’man.’ How does Sand know she was Jewish? Well, the renowned Moroccan polymath Ibn Khaldun says she was in his account of the Berbers in his great historical compendium, Al-’Ibar. That Ibn Khaldun was ...”

“... that the fighters could move from one building to another without going into the street. The HQ of Hassan, the unit commander, looked out onto a wide street, and we would take tea on the pavement, huddled around a fire despite the risk of mortar shells: ‘Inshallah,’ the men laughed.One morning, we were woken up by more ...”

“... one year. This economic crisis developed just before the presidential elections of June 2013, when Hassan Rouhani, running for the technocratic Moderation and Development Party, was elected on a promise to bargain Iran’s nuclear programme for sanctions relief. Iran’s presidents are not mere figureheads, though their ...”

“... wrong or out of date. But on one occasion it was dead-on: the inspection of the home of Fahel Hassan Hamza, a scientist who in the 1980s had conducted work related to the laser separation of radioisotopes. A cache of three thousand documents was discovered, most of which related directly to Hamza’s work with ...”

“... that Scotland was theirs, and that the Conservatives at Westminster had ‘no mandate’. As Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw argued in The Strange Death of Labour Scotland (2012), ‘Labour Scotland’ was always something of a myth, inflated by the first-past-the-post electoral system. Labour never won a majority of Scottish ...”

“... characters is responsible for the death of one of the others. To the Turks, Leila’s husband Hassan dies a hero, sure of Paradise, while the infidel Giaour, who has murdered him, will linger as a vampire before he arrives in Hell. Indeed, the Giaour’s last days, spent skulking around a convent, suggest the later ...”

“... to find/The workings of a wounded mind,’ the Giaour says disparagingly after murdering Hassan. Seyd, the Turkish ruler in The Corsair, is all business, suspicious of the least ambiguity. ‘The supper done – prepare thee to reply,/Clearly and full – I love not mystery.’ (Years later, in Don Juan, the ...”

“... media operation, the sense of invincibility generated by the speeches of Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, captivated the community. He had a remarkable ability to modulate his tone – speaking in classical Arabic in moments of fervour, only to fall back into a colloquial accent to mock his opponents. He was ...”

“... to each item of analysis: for example, a chunk of Delius’s incidental music for Flecker’s ‘Hassan’ to introduce an update on the Middle East peace process.In real life, this fictionalisation of reality can be deranging. I am intrigued, for instance, by the soundtrack which Gatwick Airport has deemed suitable for ...”

“... Hassan Nasrallah’s​ death was announced on Saturday, 28 September, the anniversary of the death of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the father of Pan-Arabism. Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, three years after his humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War, the ‘naksah’ or setback that led to Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai ...”

“... studied in the holy Shia city of Najaf in Iraq: Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah and Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. The decisive factor in the shift from Hope (Amal) to the Party of God (Hizbullah) was Sharon’s invasion in the summer of 1982, the attendant Battle of Beirut, and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, where ...”

“... polls in a general election that would have been unthinkable in the Saudi kingdom. The outcome saw Hassan Rouhani, a moderate leader keen to ease the Islamic Republic’s isolation, chosen to serve a second term as president. Rather than reinforcing the anti-Shia dynamic with multi-billion-dollar arms packages, the West ...”

“... After the First World War, the future of the British Air Force was guaranteed by Mohammed Abdille Hassan, the troublesome ‘mad Mullah’ of Somaliland, who was bombed into submission within a week. Arthur (Bomber) Harris was a squadron leader in the Third Afghan war of 1919, and pioneered the strategy of ‘control ...”

“... which had supported Abiy in Tigray, recalled its ambassador and on 8 January its president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, travelled to Asmara for discussions with Isaias. Neither of them was happy about Abiy’s talk of ‘geographic prisons’. Not satisfied by continuous conflict within Ethiopia, Abiy seems to want a ...”