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“... On 14 December 1978 small groups of people loomed out of the Kenya highland mist, as they headed down the narrow path churned into mud by the police truck which had brought Ngugi wa Thiongo home from the year in detention where he produced these books. Finding his house among the muddy maize plots north of Limuru, 20 miles from Nairobi, was easy: a single telephone-wire crossed the small-holdings and ended at his house ...”

“... Entebbe Airport evokes the pointless murder of the elderly Israeli hostage, Dora Bloch; Lake Victoria those of the four Scandinavian joumalists who set out from Kenya by boat to scoop their media colleagues with reports of the fall of Amin in 1979; the forests by the side of the road to Kampala saw countless executions of unknown men by the thugs of ...”

“... considerations which brought Britain to colonise Uganda in the 19th century. Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s Conservative Prime Minister, put it like this: Administration of the country is not the sole or the main object that should interest us. It is our business in all these new countries to make smooth the paths for British commerce, British ...”

“... The eight-year regime of Idi Amin in Uganda will go down in history as one of the 20th-century’s horrors that could have been prevented. From Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Macias Nguema’s Equatorial Guinea, the outside world was excluded, and was therefore relatively impotent and ignorant. That was not true of Uganda ...”

“... as having made ‘modest progress’ in ‘upholding pure, old-style Islamic virtues’ – and Victoria Brittain, a writer and journalist who has written with powerful effect against Guantánamo and is also an activist with the left-wing party Respect, which supports equality for women, abortion and gay rights. Poor editing and haste, rather than ...”

“... examined by a collection of writers in The Gulf between Us. The most notable gulf is that between Victoria Brittain’s introduction, which seems designed to prepare the way for a sustained polemic against the war and anything the Americans do in the region, and the quite different tone of the outstanding epilogue by Roger Owen, which, while starting off ...”

“... fiery longevity is the nearest thing to a live link between Christine de Pisan and Kate Adie; Victoria Brittain, now deputy foreign editor of the Guardian, who left the US for Vietnam with a child in tow, in order to explore ‘a sort of obsession’; and, for a time, Marina Warner, who recounts how she stood on the road in Vietnam, after witnessing ...”

“... and indefatigably-executed works of late 19th-century self-regard, comparable to the Victoria County Histories and the Survey of London. Year after year, at three-monthly intervals, the volumes plopped from the press, 63 in all, from Jacques Abbadie in 1885 to William Zuylestein in 1900, containing some thirty thousand pages on which 650 ...”