The Irish have a flair for wringing from death the last drop of emotion and they do not quite understand those who react otherwise.

poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs.

one feels guilty on behalf of Western civilisation. What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost - a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?

... I know a number of Western children who would benefit greatly if only someone were primitive enough to inhibit the development of their personalities.

Undoubtedly the Afghans must be, by our standards, the best-looking people in the world. They have everything; height, proportions, carriage, features and complexion.

apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.

This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.