... Sykes was much less pleased to come across Miss Bell. 'Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globetrotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass,' he ranted to his wife.

Well... because it's not your business or my business, or British business, or [for] anybody else to interfere in other people's countries and tell them how to run it, even to run it well. They must be left to their own salvation.

Disregarding the minor detail that the word 'Frank' was now used pejoratively to mean 'foreigner' by the Arabs, who had expelled the last of the crusaders six centuries before, de Caix brushed off the 'latent discord of race and religion' that his forbears had left behind and insisted that three centuries of sporadic bloodshed had in fact established 'a very special bond of union between the Franks of France and the world of Islam'.