More than a decade and a half ago, I travelled to Holland to meet – in the anonymity of a train station café at Leiden, at his request – one of the most brilliant Arab professors of Islamic thought, Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid.

In the febrile politics of the 1970s the National Front (NF) ruthlessly exploited working-class fears over immigration to create a far-right threat unseen in Britain since Sir Oswald Mosley.

Saad Tahr Hussein rushes me through the narrow alleyway towards Mutanabbi Street, where the concrete wall in front of the central bank hems in the pedestrians. About a thousand Iraqis briefly see – or don't notice – the sly shade of a Brit as he stumbles down the alley. Then, in the square where the statue of old Marouf al-Rasafi, poet and history-debunker under British colonial rule, glares at the crowds, we turn left into the street of books.

Education Secretary Michael Gove showed a touch of humility when he addressed the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders at the weekend.

Films taken by Mohamed Merah, the Toulouse assassin, of his murders were received by the French offices of the al-Jazeera TV station yesterday and handed to the police, the newspaper Le Parisien reported last night.

The case of the soldier who went berserk in Afghanistan and killed 16 people must be utterly baffling to psychiatrists. Who can imagine what might cause someone in a stable environment such as Kandahar, with reliable role models training you to distrust the entire local population as terrorists, and no access to weapons except automatic machine guns, to flip like that? Still, they say it's always in the tranquil places that these things happen.

The best way to win the people’s hearts and minds? Burn copies of their holy book

Distraught and furious Afghans vowed vengeance yesterday after a US soldier apparently walked off a Nato base into civilian homes, turning his weapon on the families inside and killing 16 people, nine of them children.

The recent deaths in Afghanistan have been used for the expediencies of realpolitik

President Hamid Karzai said a US service member killed 16 people - nine of them children and three women - in a shooting spree today that he condemned as “an assassination.”

Nato commanders claim President's demand has hampered vital operations against the Taliban

Conflicting conclusions appear to have emerged from two inquiries into the burning of the Koran at Bagram airbase, amid reports that British war graves in Libya were desecrated in retaliation for the mishandling of the holy book.

Two American soldiers have been shot dead at a base in Afghanistan, the latest in a series of deaths following the burning of Korans by US soldiers.

Seven people were killed today in clashes between Afghan security forces and protesters demonstrating against the burning of Muslim holy books at a Nato military base.