24 Quotes by Luke Harding

Strict shopping laws mean that most German shops close on Saturday afternoons, reopening only on Monday when everybody is back at work.

The FSB's invisible presence continued; the agency became an intangible part of my Moscow life - sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, with someone in a back room clearly turning the volume of minor persecution up and down.

Two decades after communism and the alleged end of the Cold War, Russia is still a cash economy. The preferred currency is dollars, though euros are also acceptable.

Germany's hierarchical reverence for seniority may have something to do with the fact that everything here happens relatively late. Germans start school at six, graduate in their late 20s, and get their first proper jobs in their 30s. Adolescence can go on a long time. It is rare for anyone to achieve responsibility before their 50s.

On 30 June 2010, the FSB broke into my office again. They unplugged the Internet, opened the window and left the phone off the hook, placing it next to my laptop. The message was clear: we are still here.

Taking your clothes off in front of strangers is something of a hobby in Germany, among both men and women, especially in the former communist East, where it was one of the few freedoms allowed.

When I first began visiting West Germany in the early 1980s, I was startled by the contrast between Birmingham, where I went to school, and affluent Cologne. My host family, the lovely Schumachers, always had an opulent array of grapes on the table; they were better dressed than anyone I knew in Britain.

My journalistic mission was straightforward: to await the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Nobody knew quite when this would be. But the diplomacy - the meetings in the U.N. security council, the allegations about weapons of mass destruction, the martial language of Tony Blair and George W. Bush - all suggested a war was brewing.

By the time of the GDR's demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.