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“... where it can do no mischief. But Mrs Ghezelayagh is in extravagant mood: ‘Bonjour, Monsieur de Bellaigue!’ Vous êtes tous les bienvenus à Téheran!’ she exclaims, and holds out her hand. My father takes it gratefully. Mrs Ghezelayagh’s French, learned thirty years ago when she was a student in Paris, returns elegantly. My father was English ...”

“... Farmer’s​ Glory, the classic agrarian memoir by A.G. Street, was published in 1932. The traditional mixed farm where Arthur Street spent his boyhood in the first decade of the 20th century was the centre of a self-sufficient community, stout in defence of the four-course rotation and despising anything shop-bought. There was a ‘spaciousness and an aura of solid wellbeing’ in this intermission between agricultural slumps ...”

“... Nineteen twenty-seven was a fine year to be Vita Sackville-West. She was 35, attaining what her son would call her ‘tumultuous maturity’, besieged by lovers. Her elegy to Kentish life, The Land, had won the Hawthornden Prize, and she was hesitantly revising her earlier, somewhat churlish opinions of her own talent. She was a muse to perhaps the greatest novelist of the age, Virginia Woolf, who was now setting out to immortalise her in the pages of Orlando ...”

“... De Bellaigue?’ The voice belonged to one of the senior boys in the house, someone who had never spoken to me before. I looked up from my desk, where I was surveying my untouched homework. It was the afternoon of Sunday, 10 February 1985. ‘Jaques wants to see you.’ He turned and walked away.I had first seen Jaques’s private quarters on the day I entered Eton a few weeks earlier, a term later than most of the other members of the 1984 intake ...”

“... Akram Osman’s immense novel Kuche-ye ma, which might be translated as ‘Our Street’, spans four decades of Kabul’s recent history, but stops before the worst bits.* I started it when I was in Afghanistan in July, and soon found that reading a few pages became vital to my after-work equilibrium, enabling me to feel optimistic again. Each morning, out of my hotel room, past the expats breakfasting on the lawn, through three steel-plated doors, each manned by armed guards, and into the crisis ...”

“... preventable diseases such as measles and chronic diarrhoea is staggering,’ one ICRC doctor, Bart de Poorter, has said. ‘But what doctor or vaccinator is brave enough to venture into rural areas given the appalling lack of security?’ Aid in Afghanistan has rarely been simple. When the Taliban were in charge, opinions were divided over how far one should ...”

“... There were 22 of us, in a column. As we set out, Hamid kissed me on both cheeks. He smelt of eau de cologne, and he’d put on clean clothes.’ If you’re going to meet God, there’s a protocol to be followed. ‘The Iraqis were on the heights above us. When we came under fire, we hit the deck, and Hamid was next to me. I noticed my leg was hot, and I ...”

“... to be taught publicly in universities.’ The book in which these words appear – Dissertatio de Principibus Muhammedanis qui aut eruditione aut ab amore literarum et literatorum claruerunt (‘Dissertation on Islamic princes who shone for their erudition or for their love of letters and lettered men’) – was short, widely available and accessible to ...”

“... restless compatriots with a coherent ideology and politics of anticolonial nationalism. In Christopher deBellaigue’s politically astute biography, Mossadegh is not the ‘dizzy old wizard’ and ‘tantrum-throwing Scheherazade’ of countless Anglo-American memoirs and press reports, but a member of ‘that ...”

“... his findings in eloquent and sometimes passionate prose, superbly translated this time by Sheila de Bellaigue and Roy Bridge. Beyond the biography, Röhl has illuminated the people and structures of the imperial court in dozens of books and essays; his first book, Germany without Bismarck (1967), a pioneering work of archival reconstruction, remains the ...”