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1) "This is where great empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away. Standing here opened up new ways to view the past and showed a world that was profoundly interconnected, where what happened on one continent had an impact on another, where the after-shocks of what happened on the steppes of Central Asia could be felt in North Africa, where events in Baghdad resonated in Scandinavia, where discoveries in the Americas altered the prices of goods in China and led to a surge in demand in the horse markets of northern India. These tremors were carried along a network that fans out in every direction, routes along which pilgrims and warriors, nomads and merchants have travelled, goods and produce have been bought and sold, and ideas exchanged, adapted and refined. They have carried not only prosperity, but also death and violence, disease and disaster. In the late nineteenth century, this sprawling web of connections was given a name by an eminent German geologist, Ferdinand von Richthofen (uncle of the First World War flying ace the 'Red Baron') that has stuck ever since: 'Seidenstraßen'—the Silk Roads."

2) "Desperate steps were taken to try to correct a worrying imbalance between dwindling tax revenues and the burgeoning costs of defending the frontiers—to inevitable outcry. One commentator lamented that the Emperor Diocletian, who tried to deal with the fiscal deficit aggressively, created problems rather than solving them, and 'in his greed and anxiety, he turned the whole world upside down.' A root-and-branch review of the empire's assets was conducted, the prelude to the overhaul of the tax system. Officials were dispatched to all corners, with assessors turning up unannounced to count every single vine and every single fruit tree with the aim of raising imperial revenues. An empire-wide edict was issued setting the prices for staple goods as well as for luxury imports like sesame seed, cumin, horseradish, cinnamon. A fragment of this order recently discovered in Bodrum shows how far the state was trying to reach: no fewer than twenty-six types of footwear from gilded women's sandals to 'purple low-rise Babylonian-style' shoes had price ceilings set on them by Rome's tax inspectors."

3) "Two millennia ago, silks made by hand in China were being worn by the rich and powerful in Carthage and other cities in the Mediterranean, while pottery manufactured in southern France could be found in England and in the Persian Gulf. Spices and condiments grown in India were being used in the kitchens of Xinjiang, as they were in those of Rome. Buildings in northern Afghanistan carried inscriptions in Greek, while horses from Central Asia were being ridden proudly thousands of miles away to the east. We can imagine the life of a gold coin two millennia ago, struck perhaps in a provincial mint and used by a young soldier as part of his pay to buy goods on the northern frontier in England and finding its way back to Rome in the coffers of an imperial official sent to collect taxes, before passing into the hands of a trader heading east, and then being used to pay for produce bought from traders who had come to sell their provisions at Barygaza. There it was admired and presented to leaders in the Hindu Kush, who marvelled at its design, shape and size and then gave it over to be copied by an engraver—himself perhaps from Rome, perhaps from Persia, or from India or China, or perhaps even someone local who had been taught the skills of striking. This was a world that was connected, complex and hungry for exchange."

4) "The world was entering a period of environmental change [in the 4th century CE]. In Europe, this was evidenced by rising sea levels and the emergence of malaria in the North Sea region, while in Asia from the start of the fourth century sharply reduced salinity in the Aral Sea, markedly different vegetation on the steppes (evident from high-resolution pollen analyses) and new patterns of glacier advances in the Tian Shan range all show fundamental shifts in global climatic change. The results were devastating, attested by a remarkable letter written by a Sogdian trader in the early fourth century and found not far from Dunhuang in western China. The merchant recounted to his fellow traders that food shortages and famine had taken a heavy toll, that such catastrophe had befallen China as to be barely describable. The Emperor had fled from the capital, setting fire to his palace as he left, while the Sogdian merchant communities were gone, wiped out by starvation and death. Do not bother trying to trade there, the author advised: 'there is no profit for you to gain from it.' He told of city after city being sacked. The situation was apocalyptic."

5) "The fiasco convinced the Türks that Constantinople was an unworthy and unreliable ally, something the Türk ambassador stated point-blank in 576, angrily rejecting any chance of another attack on Persia. After putting ten fingers in his mouth, he said angrily: 'As there are now ten fingers in my mouth, so you Romans have used many tongues.' Rome had deceived the Türks by promising to do their best against Persia; the results had been pitiful."

6) "It was not that aggression did not exist in other societies. As numerous examples across other continents would show, any conquest could bring death and suffering on a large scale. But periods of explosive expansion across Asia and North Africa, such as in the extraordinary first decades of the spread of Islam or during the time of the Mongol conquests, were followed by long periods of stability, peace and prosperity. The frequency and rhythm of warfare was different in Europe to other parts of the world: no sooner would one conflict be resolved than another would flare up. Competition was brutal and relentless. In that sense, seminal works like Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan were quintessential texts that explained the rise of the west. Only a European author could have concluded that the natural state of man was to be in a constant state of violence; and only a European author would have been right."

7) "The collapse of the European powers opened up the world for others. To cover the shortfalls in agricultural production and to pay for weapons and munitions, the Allies took on huge commitments, commissioning institutions such as J. P. Morgan & Co. to ensure a constant supply of goods and materials. The supply of credit resulted in a redistribution of wealth every bit as dramatic as that which followed the discovery of the Americas four centuries earlier: money flowed out of Europe to the United States in a flood of bullion and promissory notes. The war bankrupted the Old World and enriched the New. The attempt to recoup losses from Germany (set at an eye-watering and impossibly high level equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars at today's prices) was a desperate and futile attempt to prevent the inevitable: the Great War saw the treasuries of the participants ransacked as they tried to destroy each other, destroying themselves in the process. As the two bullets left the chamber of Princip's Browning revolver, Europe was a continent of empires. Italy, France, Austro-Hungary, Germany, Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, even tiny Belgium, only formed in 1831, controlled vast territories across the world. At the moment of impact, the process of turning them back into local powers began."

8) "Attention then turned to the army. The High Command was not so much decimated as annihilated, ravaged by a perverted and ruthless logic: it stood to reason that if junior officers were guilty of sedition, then their seniors were guilty either of complicity or of negligence. So one confession, beaten from a broken man, served to unleash cascades of arrests. The aim, one secret police officer later testified, was to prove the existence of a 'military conspiracy within the Red Army that implicated as many participants as possible.' Of the 101 members of the supreme military leadership, all but ten were arrested; of the ninety-one detained, all but nine were shot. These included three of the five marshals of the Soviet Union and two of its admirals, as well as the entire senior air force personnel, every head of every military district, and almost every divisional commander. The Red Army was brought to its knees. In the circumstances Stalin needed breathing space to rebuild. The German approach was a godsend. Hitler, on the other hand, was playing for higher stakes. He was desperate to gain access to resources that were essential if Germany was to build a position of strength and power in the long term. The problem was that Germany was poorly located geographically to gain access to the Atlantic and to trade with the Americas, Africa and Asia; Hitler therefore set his sights on the east. Behind his decision to reconcile with the Soviet Union was the idea that this would give him access to his very own Silk Road."

9) "Before the Second World War had drawn to a close, the fight to control the heart of Asia was well under way. In a grandly named 'Tripartite Treaty' signed in January 1942, Britain and the Soviet Union solemnly undertook 'to safeguard the Iranian people against the privations and difficulties arising as a result of the present war,' and to ensure that they received enough food and clothing. In fact, as the treaty went on to make clear, the issue had little to do with the security of Iran—and everything to do with commandeering its infrastructure: the treaty therefore declared that Britain and the Soviet Union would be able to use the country's roads, rivers, pipelines, airfields and telegraph stations as they pleased."

10) "Some historians have spoken of this moment of reworking the flows of currency as being as momentous as the transfer of power from London for India and Pakistan. But its impact was most similar to the discovery of the Americas and the redistribution of global wealth that followed. Western corporations that controlled concessions and whose distribution was largely concentrated on Europe and the United States began to funnel cash to the Middle East and, in doing so, started a shift in the world's centre of gravity. The spider's web of pipelines that criss-crossed the region and connected east with west marked a new chapter in the history of this region. This time, it was not spices or silks, slaves or silver that traversed the globe, but oil."

11) "Within hours of the attacks, strategies were being drawn up to deal with bin Laden. An action plan issued on the morning of 13 September set out the importance of engaging Iran and contacting the authorities in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and China—Afghanistan's neighbours and near neighbours. A plan was set out to '[r]e-energize' them within the week that followed, with a view to preparing them for forthcoming military action against the Taliban. The first step of the response to 9/11 was to line up the countries of the Silk Roads."

1) "Maybe the differences between our childhoods are but a version of those that exist between many parents and children. My own parents, your beloved grandparents, were not imaginary immigrant parents but real and specific ones, Black and South Asian people who journeyed to this country more than half a century ago, who worked lifelong as a minder of children and a factory labourer. They experienced many indignities and deep body aches, sacrifices and shortages, but they worked hard and they managed to raise a writer who is also a professor of literature, a fact of which they are proud but also, at times, perplexed. They do not understand everything about me, but I’m sure they believe, for good reason, that they have provided a better life for their son, and that many if not all the challenges they once experienced no longer affect me."

2) "You did not create the inequalities and injustices of this world, daughter. You are neither solely nor uniquely responsible to fix them. If there is anything to learn from the story of our ancestry, it is that you should respect and protect yourself; that you should demand not only justice but joy; that you should see, truly see, the vulnerability and the creativity and the enduring beauty of others. Today, many years after indenture and especially slavery, there are many who continue to live painfully in wakes of historical violence. And there are current terrible circumstances whereby others, in the desperate hope for a better life, either migrate or are pushed across the hardened borders of nations and find themselves stranded in unwelcoming lands. We live in a time, dearest daughter, when the callous and ignorant in wealthy nations have made it their business to loudly proclaim who are the deserving 'us' (those really 'us') and who are the alien and undeserving 'them.' But the story of our origins offers us a different insight. The people we imagine most apart from 'us' are, oftentimes, our own forgotten kin."

3) "I have tried to instill in both of you a strong sense of pride regarding your African and South Asian ancestry, knowing that one may very easily be made to feel otherwise. But the fact is that I’ve never actually named you one way or the other, never told you, authoritatively, what you are, racially speaking. I suppose that I have imagined, at times, that you, as such complexly mixed children, might have the opportunity to choose and declare your own identity. I had forgotten that racial identity is so rarely a matter of personal choice. That it is always, in origin, a falsehood and violence, though it can become, all the same, a necessary tool for acknowledging the enduring life and creativity of a persistently maligned people."

4) "That was how you handled the incident. But how did we as parents? Your mother was very angry. It was the anger of someone who had never been named the way your brother was, but who has known, as a woman, other damaging labels. I’m happy both that she revealed her anger and that you saw it. Never let anyone tell you that as a girl, you shouldn’t express how angry you are. I was angry too, but, later that evening, when we gathered as a family, I wanted to speak from something other than that emotion. For some vague and unspoken reason, we had decided, all four of us, to sit on the polished wooden floor of the living room, everyone except the notoriously inflexible me sitting fairly comfortably. In this already awkward position, I wanted to explain something to your brother, but also to you and your mother, something of vital importance, something I’d been meaning to tell you for a long time about the experience of being named. But now, as the opportunity presented itself, I was failing. I tried again and again. I kept swallowing and clearing my throat, noticing both you and your brother glancing at me but trying not to stare."

5) "I understood very well that the hurtful people around me were never monsters of the Hollywood-movie type. The boy who regaled us with [n-word] jokes might also choose me first for his team. The girl who scorned me, laughed about me with her friends, might also tell me during a chance encounter in an empty school stairwell that, actually, it wasn’t true that I was ugly. I glimpsed their contradictions, their inner doubts and vulnerabilities, their brave curiosities and cowardly tribalisms, their sincere desire to be good and also their ability to be casually cruel. The truth is that before I could appreciate my own complex humanity, I was made to understand and appreciate theirs, which I saw confirmed, over and over again, on television, in films, and in books."

1) "If you compared the Wall, Texas, of today with the Wall, Texas, of my childhood, you would hardly recognize it, because the Wall, Texas, of today has a gas station. And if you think having a gas station is not that big of a deal, then you're probably the kind of person who grew up in a town that has a gas station, and that doesn't encourage students to drive to school in their tractors. [...] Our yearbook theme one year was simply 'Where's Wall?' because it was the question you'd get asked every time you told someone you lived there. The original—and more apt—theme had been 'Where the fuck is Wall?' but the yearbook teacher quickly shot down that concept, saying that age-appropriate language was important, even at the cost of journalistic accuracy."

2) "Every time we'd go back to visit West Texas it would change a bit. The cotton fields slowly gave way to subdivisions. The tractors were upgraded and new. I'd drive around our old town to find that the snow-cone shack I'd worked at was replaced by a parking lot. The skating rink was shuttered and abandoned, the sign filled with empty birds' nests. The bookstore where I'd met Victor was gone now, and my grandparents' home was sold soon after they died. Each year, my father's small taxidermy shop grew until it became a true business, with an always-busy parking lot beside my parents' home. One day I came home to visit and was shocked to see that the elementary school I'd walked to each day had become an alternative school for pregnant teens, and the school playground I'd lived in each summer had been ripped out and demolished. My sister and I walked through the aftermath of the playground together and I took a small piece of the rubble to remember it by. Now when I pass by the school I look away and remember it the way it was, with the dangerous metal seesaws and merry-go-rounds that eventually disappeared all over America. All that remains of it today is the memory, still echoing in my head, of the sound of my favorite swing, squeaking rustily and comfortingly, over and over, back and forth."

3) "And then Victor told me to just go stay at a hotel, and that he'd take care of everything when he came back in a few days. I was half tempted, but I told Victor that I already felt bad enough for not being there for Barnaby when he'd died, and I was damned if I was going to desert him while he was being eaten. Victor told me to calm down, because I sounded like I was hyperventilating. I pointed out that I was just out of breath because I was outside, swinging the machete at the vultures. Then Victor realized that I must be using his hands-free headset, and he got all kinds of pissed off that I was 'getting it sweaty.' And that's when I hung up on him. Because getting a headset sweaty was kind of small potatoes compared to the fact that I was brandishing a machete at large raptors, while considering the pros and cons of hiring a pimp to dig up our dead dog. Victor kept yelling at me, though, since technically I didn't actually know how to hang up a hands-free headset, but I explained that he was wasting his breath, because I'd already hung up the phone in my mind and wasn't listening anymore. Then he got really shouty, so I started singing 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' to drown him out, and that's when my neighbor showed up again."

4) "When you cross over into our old hometown, you can pretty much guarantee that something fucked up is going to happen, but you're really never prepared for what it is. You may come in knowing that you're probably going to get a little blood on you, but you never think it's going to be your own. The morning of the day when I was partially mauled, Hailey and I walked outside my parents' back door to see a stranger in a black hat and a bloody rubber apron, who was missing only a mask made of human skin and a chain saw to bring his whole outfit together. He apparently worked for my father, and he'd strung up a buck that he was in the process of skinning. He smiled naturally at Hailey and me, while he seemed to be digging his hands deep into the deer's pockets, as if he were looking for his keys. Turned out, though, that deer don't even have pockets, and he'd simply lost a glove in the deer. These are the things you come in expecting when you're in Wall, and so you aren't completely surprised when a stranger cheerfully yells at your preschooler to come over and help him 'undress Mr. Reindeer because that'll be a hootload of fun!'"

1) "Earl believes strongly in Jesus, Moses, the healing power of crystals, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, that aliens landed at Roswell but the government is suppressing it, secret histories, faith-healing, snake-handling, that there is an invention that will replace gasoline but the oil companies are suppressing it, chemtrails, demon-possession, the astonishing powers of Vicks VapoRub, and that there’s proof that aliens contacted the Mayans and the Aztecs and probably the Egyptians, but the scientists are suppressing it. He believes in Skunk Ape, Chupacabras, and he positively adores Mothman. He is not Catholic, but he believes in the miracle of Fatima, visions of Mary appearing on toast, and he is nearly positive that the end times are upon us, but seems to be okay with this, provided it does not interfere with museum hours."

2) "The final object in the box was wedged crosswise to fit. It was a wooden carving, about the size of my forearm. Uncle Earl unwrapped it on the counter and paused, slowly crumpling the newspaper in his hands. 'Yech,' I said. 'That’s a creepy one.' He picked up the card and read, 'Carved corpse-otter effigy, Danube area, circa 1900.' 'Corpse-otter?' 'That’s what Woody says….' Uncle Earl slid off the stool and actually came out from behind the counter to study the carving from both sides. 'What a strange piece.'"

3) "If you play video games, sometimes you’ll encounter a bug where you suddenly fall through the world. Something goes wonky and the landscape that is pretending to be solid suddenly isn’t. And you fall through and suddenly you see that the whole virtual world is just a skin a pixel deep, and you’re looking at it from the back, like a stage set viewed from behind. All the shapes are still there, all the rocks and mountains and trees, but inverted. You can stand inside things that looked solid just a minute ago and look up through trees that are suddenly chimneys. I was getting the strangest feeling that the willows were somehow like that. If I dug one up, it wouldn’t have roots, it would just be attached to the sand, a thin willow-shaped skin made of the same stuff as the islands and the river. As if the willows and the river were… not artificial, exactly, but behind them was something vast and hollow. Hollow, but not empty."

4) "I closed my eyes against the light, which didn’t help. On the backs of my eyelids, I could picture my friends and neighbors running down the street while some unseen thing overhead hummed and chimed and unraveled their flesh until they fell down in their tracks, not alive but not nearly dead enough."