"The ultimate demographic impact on Europe of the present wave of migration is totally unpredictable"

‘Four years of Western inaction in Syria have contributed to the crisis in the Mediterranean. So has our ill-conceived intervention in Libya’

“While no longer accepting any special responsibility on the world stage, Obama pretends that we are all citizens together. Like Hamlet the President soliloquises; he does not act”

'Crumbling stones are nothing compared to the mangled bodies of Assad's victims. They are a good illustration, though, of the price of our impotence'

‘Turkey’s decision to escalate tensions with Israel is an effort to reassert itself as the leader of a neo-Ottoman Empire’

'If size of impending catastrophe is a factor, why intervene in Benghazi but not in the Syrian cities of Hama, Homs or Latakia?'

‘Then the beating began. One of the new arrivals punched Christopher hard in the face. Two others grabbed his arm and started dragging him across the street. For the first time the Hitch looked scared’

‘If we do not act, we face a nuclear-armed Iran or a new Middle East confrontation’

The cartoon controversy has cowed all the Nordic countries except Denmark

‘Few opinion-shapers in the West feel outraged enough to condemn it, let alone grasp what is at stake in the Hariri tribunal’