Pop Smart - Pulled Quote: Dreamers of the Day
“Gertrude,” he countered, “you simply cannot draw a line around Mosul, Baghdad and Basra and declare everything inside it a nation! It won’t matter whom you use as a figurehead.”
“Well, of course,” Miss Bell said airily, “we’ll have to take Kurdish sentiments into account.”
– From Dreamers of the Day, Mary Doria Russell’s historical novel set at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference and featuring Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) and Lady Gertrude Bell. Russell will sign copies of the book at the Decatur Public Library at 7:15 p.m. Wed., March 26. (Ironically, I chose the above quote completely at random, even though it speaks directly to the internal political stresses on modern-day Iraq.)