Historians disagree on 1976: Haugbolle ranks it among the war's largest emigration waves, while de Clerck and Malsagne see many returning that year after nearly 400,000 Lebanese had left by 1975. Haugbolle notes that no official figures exist.

Fisk reads the mutilation of al-Lawzi's body as a warning to the Lebanese press: the flesh of his writing hand had been removed, by knife or acid, and two shots fired into his neck from behind. A shepherd found him, half under snow, in the Aramoun woods on 5 March.

The 59-year-old ambassador was shot in his locked car at about 1.55 p.m., some 60 metres from a Syrian checkpoint (Malsagne), while heading home near the Résidence des Pins. Malsagne blames a pro-Syrian Shiite commando; the next ambassador, Paul-Marc Henry, saw a botched kidnapping ordered by Iranian intelligence. France was then moving closer to the PLO.

Hanf describes the Shi'i Amal movement fighting the Iraqi-backed Arab Liberation Front and small communist organisations in West Beirut in the first months of 1982.

The Lebanese army had under 24 hours' warning, Fisk writes, before Israeli troops began leaving Aley and the Chouf on the evening of 3 September; by the morning of the 4th they had gone. De Clerck and Malsagne count more than 10,000 Christians from over 60 villages sheltering in Deir el-Qamar.

US aircraft struck Syrian positions on 4 December. Fisk counts one plane brought down, with the pilot dead and the co-pilot taken prisoner (Jesse Jackson obtained his release in January 1984); Hanf counts two planes lost. Hanf also places, without a date, the deaths of eight Marines from Syrian artillery fire in the same episode.

Counts of attacks on the Israeli army vary by source and period: Fisk reports 15 ambushes a week on average by February 1984 and a hundred attacks in December 1984; de Clerck and Malsagne put suicide attacks at about a hundred a month in 1984.

Annual figures: the pound fell to about 16 to the dollar in 1985 against 6.5 in 1984, with retail inflation of about 70 per cent (Hanf, citing Abou Rjaily and Labaki); de Clerck and Malsagne put the 1985 devaluation at 150 per cent. Hanf notes that rumours of large PLO deposits briefly strengthened the pound in early 1985.

On 4 March 1985, a day after an Israeli raid, a bomb on the roof of the resistance office above Maarakeh's mosque killed Khalil Jerardi, nominally Amal but a Hezbollah supporter, and Mohammed Saad, an Amal commander in the south. French UN officers who examined it believed the departing Israelis had left it (Fisk's report, not an established finding).

Syrian troops entered Zahleh on 7 September after the Lebanese Forces' withdrawal (Hanf).

The books place the renewed Amal-Hezbollah fighting of December 1989 in Iqlim al-Touffah, east of Sidon. Hanf says it started after Hezbollah fighters from the Bekaa crossed the zone held by the South Lebanon Army.