The dirty Arab children sold peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. They spoke a masterful unintimidated French in guttural gasps, coming from a land where it was regarded neither as the most beautiful language, as in America, nor the only one, as in France.

Before their displacement from nature, baffled by their own culture which they could not define, and so believed did not exist, these transatlantic visitors had learned to admire in this neatly parceled definition of civilization the tyrannous pretension of many founded upon the rebellious efforts of a few, the ostentation of thousands presumed upon the strength of a dozen who had from time to time risen against this vain complacence with the past to which they were soon to contribute, giving, with their harried deaths, grounds for vanity of language, which they had perfected; supercilious posturing of intellect, which they had suffered to understand and deliver, in defiance; insolent arbitration of taste, grown from the efforts of those condemned as having none; planted in the rain of contempt for themselves; dogmata of excellence founded upon insulting challenges wrought in impossible hope, and then grasped, for granted, from their hands fallen clenching it as dogma.

From the intractable perfection of the crepusculous Île de la Cité (seen from the Pont des Arts) to the static depravity of the Grands Boulevards, it was unimpeachable: in superficiating this perfection, it absorbed the beholder and shut out the creator: no more could it have been imitation than a mermaid (though echoes were heard of the Siren of Dijbouti).

[...] they admired the rudeness, which they called self-respect; the contempt, which they called innate dignity; the avarice, which they called self-reliance; the tasteless ill-made clothes on the men, lauded as indifference, and the far-spaced posturings of hate couture across the Seine, called inimitable or shik according to one's stay. Marvelous to wide eyes, pricked ears, and minds of that erectile quality betraying naive qualms of transatlantic origin (alert here under hair imitative long-grown, uncombed, on the male, curly shorn on the girls) was this spectacle of culture fully realized. They regarded as the height of excellence that nothing remained to be done, no tree to be planted nor building torn down (they had not visited Le Bourget; found the wreckage up behind the Hôtel de Ville picturesque), no tree too low nor building too high (those telescoping lampposts on the Pont du Carrousel), no bud of possibility which had not opened in the permanent bloom of artificial flowers, no room for that growth which is the abiding flower of humility.

Paris lay by like a promise accomplished: age had not withered her, nor custom staled her infinite vulgarity.

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

Keith spoke of the great joy felt not only by the Chinese people but by the oppressed people of the whole world when, in October 1964, China successfully detonated its first atomic bomb. Malcolm X described this event as “the greatest thing that has ever happened in the 20th century to the black people”. Keith cited the Xinhua report that contained Malcolm X’s comments: “Referring to the present struggle of the American Negroes and the firm support given to this struggle by the Chinese people, he said that the US imperialists would never loosen their grip on the 22 million colonised American Negroes before the peoples of Asia and Africa cast off the yoke of imperialism and became strong. Bearing this in mind, we therefore appreciate the great strides that the Chinese people have made toward true independence and the unlimited contribution they are making to help the oppressed peoples in other parts of the world to throw off the chains of imperialism.”