Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever.

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

The genealogy of fictional characters can become an obsession, like train-spotting, and should be firmly resisted.

Revolutionaries are not infallible.

[Taken from a BBC documentary]

Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents.

As long as the Pentagon bankrolls the Pakistan army to fight its wars, and NATO troops remain in Afghanistan, there will be quarrels, charges of infidelity, a reduction in the household allowance, perhaps a separation - but a divorce? Never.