Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz, self-portrait, before 1914

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Vanquished in the field of arms, Armenia seeks salvation in the scriptoria... These must have been enormous collections: in 1170 the Seljuks destroy a library in Syunik consisting of ten thousand volumes... At first they wrote on skins, then on paper. They once made a book that weighed thirty-two kilograms. Seven hundred calves went into it... Golden armies of small Armenian letters crawl over hundreds of pages... The fate of these books is the history of the Armenians.

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_{Ola Watowa, Kazakhstan 1941}

Then I saw how powerful the property instinct is, the way it defied the system that wanted to produce Homo Sovieticus.

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In the current intense environment, Kapuściński’s Shah of Shahs (1982) is extremely pertinent and ought to be compulsory reading in some quarters.

Being a glutton for punishment and a lover of vast canvases, Kapuściński set himself the daunting task of describing the lead-up to, and outcome of, the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Apart from providing a broad and enlightening backdrop for the genesis of the Iran's Islamic Republic, this book also demonstrates how a mind can navigate its way through overwhelming events and material to arrive at a degree of robust, condensed clarity: it is done by bothering to listen carefully, by slow absorption and pausing for thought, by a laborious writing process involving ruthless chiselling; not by thoughtless clicking, sloppy scanning and semi-automated copying and pasting.

Shah of Shahs is a rare breed of book: despite being about hugely controversial characters and events, Kapuściński manages to avoid the vicious polarities which are part and parcel of divisive 'us or them' politics; it does not seek to convince us or force an agenda down our throat.

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