David Aaronovitch

"But, [[John Pilger|[John] Pilger]] objected, "Amnesty produced a catalogue of Saddam's killings that amounted mostly to hundreds every year, not millions. It is an appaling record that does not require the exaggeration of state-inspired propaganda". In fact Pilger's own source said (unquoted by him) that, in addition to the number of known executions Amnesty had also collected information on around 17,000 cases of disappearances, over the last 20 years, and "the real figure may be much higher"."

"During the Anfal anti-Kurdish campaign in 1987 as many as 180,000 Kurds disappeared. At Halabja, in one incident alone, more people were killed than in the whole of this latest Gulf war. The most conservative death toll attached to the repression of the Shia uprising in 1991 was 30,000. One million died in the Iran-Iraq war started by Saddam. And this is reduced by Pilger to "hundreds every year"."

"When the discussion gets under way, a number of things become apparent. The first is that the people here are mostly very bright, very well-informed and anything but swivel-eyed saddos. The second is that sci-fi and fantasy are not, as I'd imagined, boys-only territories. Half the people attending are women, and mostly feminists at that. Perhaps because the creation of alternative worlds allows imaginary spaces in which sexism and male awfulness simply do not exist. (In the afternoon I was part of a small otherwise all-female audience for two women librarians discussing censorship in children's sci-fi. I learnt a lot.) More than anything these people — men and women — seemed to want to be writers. They had a detailed appreciation of plotting and characterisation, and seemed to seek advice about their own projects whenever they could."

"[On his mother] She was disapproving when I grew my hair long and even more disapproving when, a few years later, I cut it again. I had, in a sense, let my own hair down."

"The left's vice has always been self-righteousness, just as the right's is smugness. But when you add the sense of entitlement that is characteristic of so many of the younger middle-class people in Britain, you can end up with an impatience with compromise coupled to a belief that anything that is strongly felt must somehow be enacted."

"It was quite clearly satirising the Supreme Court decision. It therefore follows that those people who made the complaints on Twitter and in the newspapers and on GB News knew very well that Aaronovitch had not remotely 'suggested' that Biden should have Trump killed, but pretended that's what they thought because they disagree politically with the writer and wished to land him in hot water. In other words, they were lying. There is no other word for it. To deliberately misconstrue something is to lie, and that's what they did, thousands upon thousands of them."

"The grand-paternal Aaronovitches came to England as Jewish refugees — "aliens" as the 1906 anti-immigration legislation called them — fleeing the murderous Russian pogroms. They scraped in just before the door closed on their kind. Aaronovitch's paternal grandfather drifted into the east London rag trade. Buttonholes were the illiterate old needleman's speciality. David's paternal grandmother spoke Yiddish all her life. The book's central focus is on David's parents. They are not, for him, mum and dad. He uses their first names — Lavender and Sam — throughout. It is as if he is holding them up with forceps."