Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise

There would be no global Christianity without this city, which later, under the Ottomans, came to be known as The Abode of Happiness. Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise. Its stony melancholy is imperial, austere and attuned to the One God, whether that of Justinian or of Mehmet the Conqueror. 'Gong-tormented' and vaporous, as Patrick Leigh Fermor famously described it in Mani, that exquisite meditation on, among many other things, the long drawn-out and misunderstood genius of Byzantium.

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 196

A good ice cream lulls in the mind in the same way, almost, and there is about it the sweet intoxication of virtue

The Islamic warriors did not see anything to enrage them. The bar did not exist. The women were not 'exposed'. There was just the mall itself, where I sat down at last to eat an ice cream under the smiles of the headscarfed girls who served them. Ice cream. Isn't ice cream always the substitution for a nice beer, from 'dry' Islamabad to 'dry' Ocean City, New Jersey?  A good ice cream lulls in the mind in the same way, almost, and there is about it the sweet intoxication of virtue.

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 173-4

Shi'ites always cut a deal. It was the Sunni fanatics who were the darkest version of the future

I went to Chateau Massaya and had lunch with the winemaker Ramzi Ghosn. He insisted that Hezbollah were not a problem. Their people made substantial earnings as vineyards workers and in the light of this reality the clerics would turn a blind eye. Shi'ites always cut a deal. It was the Sunni fanatics who were the darkest version of the future.

'The boys with the beards up in the hills, they are the ones who make me sleepless at night. They are the madmen. The Shi'a are something else.'

'Not true fanatics?' 

'Not about these things.'

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 33