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“... Just outside Durban lies the vast black squatter camp of Inanda, whose huddling shacks house half a million people or more – the only way to perform a census is to take an aerial photograph and allow for six people per shack. On Inanda’s eastern edge lies the historic Gandhi Settlement, founded by the Mahatma before he set off to lead the struggle against the British in India ...”

“... It’s a dependable party game: who was the MP who sat from 1950 to 1987, emerged as a strong and early opponent of hanging and supported homosexual law reform; was fiercely anti-Nato, anti-American and opposed to Britain possessing nuclear weapons; pioneered the Clean Air Act, vociferously opposed subsidies to farmers, attacked the monopoly of the big drug firms as suppliers to the NHS and was the first person to take the anti-smoking cause to the Cabinet; became a vehement critic of Empire and hugely embarrassed a Tory government by a passionate condemnation of British treatment of Africans confined in the Hola Camp in Kenya? (The MP in question was so infuriated by the racist excuse that different standards applied in Africa that he/she actually cried with vexation at the end of the speech ...”

“... Would you believe,’ asked Ronald Reagan, opening his campaign for Governor in 1966, ‘that 15.1 per cent of the population of California is on welfare?’ A pretty shocking figure, you might think, for the Golden State in the midst of the Vietnam War boom: no wonder Reagan’s well-heeled backers were so righteously indignant about all their tax money going to all those layabouts ...”

“... The thing that really got to me after a while was the prostitutes. As I drove back from Cape Town city centre to suburban Mowbray at night along the old Main Road, I would see dozens of them beckoning to motorists, and sometimes as I waited at the traffic-light at Mowbray bus-station, the pimps would genially slap the side of my car to attract my attention to their Xhosa or Coloured charges ...”

“... Harare is morose under the rains, more drenching this year even than last year, and longer than most can remember; five or seven centimetres, day after day. It’s made the water table too high and water lies permanently on the surface, sewage floating in it, for the city’s long-neglected sewage system is on the point of collapse. This wouldn’t be easy for anyone to bear, but it’s particularly hard for the residents of Harare, who point to the colossal mansion which the mayor, Solomon Tawengwa, is building for himself and the Mercedes cars which he and his municipal colleagues have awarded themselves ...”

“... One of the oddities about living in South Africa is that a whole lot of people who have left the country still believe that they know better than those of us who live here what goes on. The reason for this is that South Africa is seen as the supreme paradigm both of colonial exploitation and of black-white relations – what Nadine Gordimer called ‘the last great colonial extravaganza ...”

“... As for his secret Spials, which he did employ both at home and abroad, by them to discover what Practices and Conspiracies were against him, surely his Case required it: He had such Moles perpetually working and casting to undermine him. Neither can it be reprehended. For if Spials be lawful against lawful Enemies, much more against Conspirators and Traytors ...”

“... Throughout the time I was working on my own book on the KAL 007 tragedy I heard reports that Seymour Hersh was working on a parallel book, and I looked forward to it keenly. Ever since he sprang to prominence with his exposure of the My Lai massacre 17 years ago I have read his writings with respect, sometimes with admiration. It is thus with some regret that I have to say that I found his KAL 007 book a very considerable disappointment ...”

“... In the first few pages of Walter Laqueur’s The Age of Terrorism (largely a reworking and updating of his 1977 work, Terrorism), the author attempts to confront the old adage that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ Laqueur will have none of it: Of all the observations on terrorism this is surely one of the tritest. There is no unanimity on any subject under the sun, and it is perfectly true that terrorists have well-wishers ...”

“... while Joe, to put it mildly, had a considerable tolerance of it. This was well brought out by the row that developed in the late Seventies over the revelation that the Zapu leader in Rhodesia, Joshua Nkomo, was being funded by Tiny Rowland’s Lonrho. Since the SACP was supporting Zapu, Joe joined in the charge against the ‘bourgeois press’ who, by ...”

“... Jean Suret-Canale, or Suret as everyone called him, was one of the finest Marxist historians and geographers of the last century. A pioneering Africanist, his books on Francophone Africa were translated into many languages and won him a large audience in Africa, China, Russia and Eastern Europe. The lives of most historians are lived in the comfort of libraries and university departments and don’t make for interesting biography: Suret was an exception ...”

“... The sequence of events that produced the current deadlock in Zimbabwe began on 11 March last year when Morgan Tsvangirai and a number of other members of the Movement for Democratic Change were arrested, tortured and beaten. Robert Mugabe had banned all MDC meetings and rallies in the hope of suppressing the MDC completely before this year’s elections ...”

“... Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and blood, the look in his eyes was a glance from nowhere … without vision; Marie-Ange, aged nine, was propped up against a tree trunk … her legs apart, and she was covered in excrement, sperm and blood … in her mouth was a penis, cut with a machete, that of her father … nearby in a ditch with stinking water were four bodies, cut up, piled up, their parents and older brothers ...”

“... our policy?’ the Prime Minister asked – he had not been consulted – and ordered Whelan to ‘row back’. ‘Sorry, Tony, it’s too late,’ he was told. A conference call between Blair, Campbell, Brown, Balls, Mandelson and Whelan dealt with the crisis. No one thought it odd that the real inner cabinet not only did not include the Deputy Prime ...”

“... This book begins with real passion as Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw lash into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter ...”