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“... rapidly once he entered into close partnership with the British shippers and grain dealers Andrew Weir & Co. Another son, Muhammad Ali, prospered as the chief executive of the government-owned Rafidain bank. The Chalabis were now comfortably established at the top of Baghdadi commerce and society. The city was undergoing a renaissance after centuries ...”

“... in Military Affairs’. The phrase had been popularised in defence circles in the 1980s by Andrew Marshall, a former Rand analyst who headed the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. Marshall believed that new technologies in surveillance, communication and missile targeting had fundamentally changed the nature of warfare because they made it possible ...”

“... terrifying threat. Occupying a scarcely less prominent position in Brose’s pantheon is the late Andrew Marshall, who was for decades the director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. Marshall was an immensely powerful bureaucrat who enjoyed a reputation for unorthodox thinking, yet nevertheless somehow always wound up making the case for increased ...”

“... Between 22 June 1941 and 9 May 1945 the Red Army of Workers and Peasants disposed of ten million German troops, destroyed over six hundred enemy divisions, liberated all of Eastern Europe and finally stormed, unaided, the ‘lair of the fascist beast’, Berlin. This achievement must be considered one of the most extraordinary in military history, for at the outset the Russians were caught completely by surprise and almost completely unprepared ...”

“... Few people now remember that for many months after the First World War ended in November 1918 the blockade of Germany, where the population was already on the edge of starvation, was maintained with full rigour. By the following spring, the German authorities were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate. In a later memoir, John Maynard Keynes attributed the prolongation of civilian punishment to a cause inherent in bureaucracy ...”

“... Donald Rumsfeld, you could say, has had a remarkable career, stretching from a middle-class upbringing amid wealthier neighbours on the edge of Chicago, through Congress and high office in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including a spell as secretary of defense, a profitable excursion into business, and finally six tumultuous years heading the Pentagon under George W ...”

“... At​ the end of last year the Russian military announced that it had deployed a revolutionary weapon, designed to give Russia a decisive advantage in the strategic nuclear arms race. Avangard, as the new system is called, is a ‘hypersonic glide’ missile. Unlike traditional Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, which follow a fixed and predictable trajectory, arcing up as high as 1200 miles into space and re-entering the atmosphere at around 15,000 miles an hour before plunging down to their target, the Avangard glider is launched by an ICBM booster on a much lower trajectory to skirt the edge of the atmosphere, between 25 and 60 miles up ...”

“... In the vast​ and growing body of literature on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the installation of Soviet warheads on the island elicited fears of nuclear war, there is barely a mention of the influence that US domestic politics may have had on the course of events. Theodore Voorhees’s study is different. He highlights the all-important fact that in October 1962 John F ...”

“... It has long been accepted in the Arab world and in Iran that US foreign policy towards the Middle Last is a conspiracy devised by the American Jewish lobby. It has long been accepted in Europe that the Arabs and Iranians, although prone to exaggeration, had a legitimate grievance about Washington’s automatic bias in favour of Israel since the departure of Eisenhower ...”

“... who caught it, the doctors knew of none that would make much difference. (In this book, Patrick Cockburn concludes that Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year still offers the soundest advice for those caught in epidemics: run away.) But although this was not Cork’s first epidemic, it was the most vicious. The death toll seems to have been relatively ...”

“... in County Cork. It was an isolated location: isolated enough for my parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, to imagine that we would be safe from the virus that had started circulating in Cork city three months earlier. But our isolation wasn’t complete since my father was travelling to and fro between Cork and London by boat and train. It was a hot summer ...”

“... Captain Khalid, launched repeated raids to find out who was selling them. In 1999 my brother Andrew and I wrote a history of Iraq after the first Gulf War called Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein. It was later republished in Britain as Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession. I knew the regime wouldn’t like it because of its ...”

“... and nasty passage which occurs when Worsthorne, stuck in Ireland for a long weekend with the young Andrew Knight, suggested ‘that we propose ourselves for the night to the Claud Cockburns in Youghal’. Having invited himself, and having taken the Cockburns’ bread and salt, Worsthorne takes leave to depict his host as ‘an obviously sad and drunken ...”

“... his own magazine and sought out the Eye’s founders – Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and Andrew Osmond – and bought the magazine from Osmond for £1500. This was a substantial, though not an enormous investment. Within a year or so, he moved the Eye offices into the Establishment Club and then next door. At that time, the Eye consisted entirely of ...”

“... happen,’ even though there has been an increase in the number of wars. Later in the same volume Andrew Linklater maintained that ‘there is no doubt that globalisation and fragmentation have reduced the modern state’s willingness and capacity to wage the kinds of war which typified the last century.’ America, Britain and some cronies may have lapsed ...”