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“... our own time, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to the Balkans in the 1930s and Rory Stewart (and dog) walked through Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Macfarlane is a member of this group of walkers, with the extra strand that he knows he is going to write about his journeys. It’s at this point that a precarious balance ...”

“... to call for war on the Taliban. Navy Seals brandished copies of Clausewitz on Fox News, and Rory Stewart and George Packer wondered if America can still regain its soul. Afghan contractors and co-operators have been consigned the fate of the Hmong of Vietnam and the Harkis of Algeria. And, just as before, the women and girls of Afghanistan are ...”

“... the reason the plotters moved in Liz Truss to succeed Johnson, rather than their main man, Sunak. Rory Stewart, a cabinet minister under May and now Britain’s most successful failed politician, sees Truss’s elevation, like Johnson’s, as proof of deep decay in the British political system, which he excoriates in his memoir ‘from within’. He ...”

“... a mayor was a big part of his national appeal. More pragmatism, less BS. It’s the same argument Rory Stewart gave for quitting national politics in order to run for mayor of London, before the pandemic put a stop to that. Being mayor was the only way you could be sure you were making a difference to people’s lives. Emanuel sums it up: city ...”

“... addicted to thirty-mile walks in his oldest tweeds, he might have been more at home with Rory Stewart, but there’s possibly a bit of Buchan’s vision in the Black Stone of Brexit, and a bit of Hannay in Johnson’s swagger. It can’t only be down to Hitchcock that The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print, or that most bookshops ...”

“... Exiting the European Union. Even the ranks of decency are stocked by old Etonians: Oliver Letwin, Rory Stewart and Hugo Dixon, editor in chief of the useful anti-Brexit website InFacts. (I remember Dixon, a King’s Scholar: skinny, super-bright, otherworldly.) I feel 13 again because the old questions reassert themselves. How did these people get ...”

“... March. This last week I finish reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen and The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, both books about wildernesses, Stewart’s in Afghanistan, Cowen’s in almost comical contrast in and around Harrogate. As he tells the story Stewart seems in regular ...”

“... took its bearings from a 14-page white paper by Gerald Knaus, who once co-wrote a book with Rory Stewart defending humanitarian intervention and now operates a think tank out of an apartment in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood of Berlin. Knaus’s suggestion was simple: Merkel had to offer Erdoğan and other gatekeepers a strong enough incentive to keep ...”

“... outlines of the foothills of civil war. In the end, the courts intervened, before the then MP Rory Stewart had a chance to convene an alternative parliament which, he admitted, ‘sounds quite Civil War-ist’. Watching the Capitol riot a year and a bit later, the pro-lie votes of the pro-Trump Republicans were more troubling than the conduct of the ...”

“... other community. Ulster is, and remains, a collage of confessional territories. As the late A.T.Q. Stewart remarked in his history of Ulster, The Narrow Ground (1977), every resident of the province carries around in his or her head a complex and detailed geography: they know which villages or streets are Protestant or Catholic, or mixed. These internalised ...”

“... to go disastrously to Crusader Bible classes.12 September. The last few weeks I’ve been reading Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards, an account of his time serving in the coalition administration of Iraq. He is a courageous man, though it ought to be a depressing book, as for all Stewart’s tireless ...”