Time, then, to bury Lenin's body and revive some of his ideas. Future generations in Russia might realise that Lenin still has a bit more to offer th… - 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.

Hamas's atrocities, as they call it[, was] not something I would support, but in the middle of a liberation war that has been going on for nearly three decades it's a bit difficult for us sitting here to give concrete advice on tactics.

Revolutionary periods invariably encompass a huge fluctuation of political consciousness that can never be registered accurately by any referendum.