Had the United States remained neutral, as a majority of the country wanted, a ceasefire and truce between the British and German empires would have … - Tariq Ali

For my parents, most of whose friends suddenly vanished, Lahore in the fifties was like a ghost town. The pain of Partition has been sensitively depicted in a number of short stories by the Urdu writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, and by poets like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Sahir Ludhianvi. I had been three and a half years old in 1947. Pre-Partition Lahore, for me, existed only in numerous overheard conversations. The recent past became a subject for discussions, sometimes heated, but more often sad, and these could be heard in every quarter of the city. They frequently centred on the vibrancy of the town. During the twenties, thirties and forties, it had been an important cultural centre, a home for poets and painters, a city that was proud of its cosmopolitanism. Nineteen forty-seven had changed all that for ever. The old coffee houses and teashops were still in place, but the Hindu and Sikh faces had disappeared, never to return. This fact was soon accepted; political gossip and poetry reasserted their old primacy under new conditions.

The Muslim League was always an extremely weak organization by comparison. Originally created by Islamic princes and nobles in 1906 "to foster a sense of loyalty to the British government among the Muslims of India" (to cite from its statement of aims), it was captured by the educated Muslim middle class led by Jinnah in the 1930s and for a brief period was in alliance with the Congress Party. However, its main thrust was always anti-Hindu rather than anti-British.

One of the worst criminals Europe ever produced was Leopold of Belgium, whose ownership of and brutalities in the Congo led to the deaths of several million Africans.