Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

I know well the delectable thrill of moving into a new house somewhere altogether else, in somebody else’s county, where the climate is different, the food is different, the light is different, where the mundane preoccupations of life at home don’t seem to apply and it is even fun to go shopping.

Basque is one of the world's more alarming languages. Only a handful of adult foreigners, they say, have ever managed to learn it. The Devil tried once and mastered only three words - profanities, I assume.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

I half cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.