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“... any official front, studying pro-Iraq badges (‘Saddam. One Like You Makes Dream Come True’) in Jordan, watching Palestinians in the Occupied Territories slowly crushed under the weight of their support for Saddam, or discovering how a rich Kuwaiti hotelier kept most of his money and his family safe by buying off the Iraqi occupiers – mostly with TV ...”

“... a messenger boy for Reuters, an office boy for an auctioneer, a junior clerk for Sunlight Soap and Jordan & Co, and a cashier for an engineering company. It was sprinting he excelled at, though, which presumably served him well at Reuters, where he’d sometimes carry out his duties on roller skates. Curiously, the name given to his kind of running was ...”

“... chewing-gum dispenser) than from the work of his predecessors in art. As it happened, his sister Elizabeth was thought to be the artistic member of the family. She was sent to take painting classes with Edward Hopper, the son of the man who owned the local dry goods store. Joseph preferred to stay at home, immersed in Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers ...”

“... rural leaders, deliver services and win respect. The quality of journalists in Iraq has been high: Elizabeth Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move ...”

“... I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a series of expeditions along the permitted riverpath from mouth to source. My ...”

“... who were willing to risk their lives in a desperate crusade,’ Wisner’s daughter, the historian Elizabeth Hazard, would write, ‘but its policies had subverted the possibility of an early detente with the Soviet Union.’In March 1957, back in Washington, Wisner offered to direct an operation to overthrow President Sukarno of Indonesia. It ended, Anderson ...”

“... Zionism (which wanted to impose a Jewish state on the whole of Palestine, including what is now Jordan). This was the first of Koestler’s surrenders to an absolutist ideal. He set off for Palestine, but soon discovered that manual labour on a spartan collective farm was not his style and returned to Europe. There, in 1930, he landed a job in Berlin with ...”