Adam LeBor
Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction
Tamerlane: Sword of Islan Conqueror of the World
By Justin Marozzi
HarperCollins 449pp £25 order from our bookshop
TYRANTS WREAKING DEATH and destruction are much in the news lately. Saddam Hussein has been charged with crimes against humanity, and will eventually be tried in Baghdad. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian President, is on trial in The Hague, accused of war crimes and genocide in Bosnia. In both cases, the challenge before the prosecutors is to prove that the defendant exercised ‘command responsibility’, meaning that he either ordered atrocities, or knew they were occurring and did nothing to stop them.
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'The Bible is all but silent on yellow, as it is on most colours.'
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'Houses always reveal something of their occupants, but none so much as writers’ houses.'
Frances Wilson goes from Keats House to Dove Cottage and beyond.
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'I miss, in this free society ... the kind of solidarity, the shared accountability, the willingness to risk one’s skin for others, that came with the unremitting threat levelled against dissident society.'
Roger Scruton interviews Vaclev Havel (2003).
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