Lahore, Pakistan

Election turmoil: Pakistan’s former PM Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Maryam were arrested at Lahore airport last Friday, as they returned to the country to rally support for their flagging PML-N party in next week’s election. Earlier this month, the Sharifs had been convicted in absentia of corruption: Sharif, who was ousted last year, claims the charges – relating to his ownership of luxury flats in London – were trumped up. In dramatic scenes, the authorities set up roadblocks to prevent hundreds of his supporters reaching the airport. Sharif claims that Pakistan’s powerful military is working to ensure the victory of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreeke-insaf party. On the same day, preelection tensions were raised yet further by a suicide attack on a rally in Balochistan, in which 149 people were killed.

In 1939, Madeleine Albright fled Prague with her parents, and ended up living in a flat on London’s Portobello Road. The former US secretary of state was only two, yet she remembers her sense of dislocation: “My parents were very continental European and I didn’t have siblings,” she told Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. “I felt isolated.” But later, after they’d moved to Walton-on-thames, she began to love her new life: “I went to school and we spent a lot of time in air-raid shelters singing A Hundred Green Bottles

Hanging on the Wall.” Their hosts were welcoming – up to a point. “The British would say, ‘We’re so sorry your country has been taken over by a terrible dictator. What can we do to help you and when are you going home?’” After the War, they did go home – only to flee again, in 1948, to escape the communists. This time they went to America. There, Albright, 81, remembers people saying: “‘We’re so sorry your country has been taken over by a terrible system. What can we do to help you and when will you become a citizen?’ That was different about America at that time.”