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“... They’ve​ been calling me Al-Ghadab, “Fury”, from the beginning,’ the smuggler said, his big beard split by a mischievous smile, ‘But I laugh all the time!’ A stocky man wearing a black tracksuit and carrying two mobile phones, Fury stood in a freezing apartment in Tripoli. Two men were with him, both Lebanese, smugglers apparently. But he wasn’t a professional ...”

“... Over Sixty Hours without an Execution.’ When PM, the biggest tabloid in Ciudad Juárez, can’t find a corpse to put on its front page, it has to come up with something. On 21 November last year it announced that ‘the city has just experienced an unusual outbreak of peace … the longest for three years. Newspaper statistics show that from 29 December 2008, fifty hours passed without a killing ...”

“... They’ll never pull it off, people said. Too little time, too little money, obstruction from the North … The April 2010 elections – both presidential and local – had gone poorly, ‘highly chaotic, non-transparent, and vulnerable to electoral manipulation’, as the international observers from the Carter Center declared. And a failed referendum would be even worse than no referendum at all: it would open the door to all of Khartoum’s objections, and lead straight to another civil war ...”

“... Since Ramzan Kadyrov, the young president of Chechnya, is, as everyone knows, ‘the greatest builder in the world’, it’s a happy chance that has the visitor from abroad arriving in Grozny on 27 April, the eve of Dyen Stroitelei, Builders’ Day, so called to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Ministry of Construction. Tamir, a young Chechen press attaché assigned to help me, had invited me to join him that day in the city’s theatre ...”

“... ostensibly for his own satisfaction, or perhaps ‘to kill time before it finally kills you’. Jonathan Littell, an American educated in France, wrote The Kindly Ones in French. It won the Prix Goncourt and sold a million copies in Europe. The reception in Anglophone countries but especially in Germany has been much more critical. Yet from the first ...”

“... again. Presenting the matter in the starkest possible terms, the human rights worker and novelist Jonathan Littell remarked in 2008: When a family is sitting in its house in Foca and suddenly someone bursts in with a machine gun, chains up the daughter to the radiator and rapes her in front of her family, this is no laughing matter. Okay you might ...”

“... death warrant. One picture of the condition of the armed rebellion in early 2012 is provided by Jonathan Littell, who got himself smuggled into Syria from northern Lebanon and witnessed what was going on in Qusayr and the rebel-held neighbourhoods of Homs. His book, a diary of 18 intense days, consists of his raw and confusing daily jottings. He writes ...”