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“... of faith. All this is a far cry from the myth of unbroken hostility between Russia and Islam. Robert Crews makes many of these points in his new book on Russia’s management of its Muslim subjects from the reign of Catherine the Great until 1917. Unfortunately, to make up for the sins of past generations, ...”

“... was the only Arab leader prepared to confront the world’s most powerful nation. The television crews were invited to Tripoli. Reagan, Gaddafi announced, was trying to start a third world war. What did Mr Reagan think? Simple. Gaddafi, Reagan announced, was ‘flakey’. And so it went on. ‘Colonel Gaddafi,’ I heard a television journalist ask the ...”

“... reported that passing aircraft could interfere with radio reception. Less than a year later, Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated by a simple experiment in a field outside Daventry that aircraft could be detected by radio. Radar was born. Remarkably, it was only two years after this that Lindemann demonstrated to Churchill that tinfoil strips cut to a certain ...”

“... direction. On the day he won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Mullis went surfing. The camera crews tried to follow him down the Southern California coast, ‘asking everyone who came out of the water whether he was Kary Mullis’. Mullis was enjoying his new-found anonymity and got a surfer-dude friend to admit to being the great man himself. How does it ...”

“... Every spring, American camera crews and sound-teams and the boys and girls of ‘the pencil press’ (as it is still quaintly known) load their equipment or stuff their notebooks in a pocket and set off for the unthrilling town of Punxatawney, Pennsylvania. The occasion is ‘Groundhog Day’, when a local creature named Punxatawney Phil is reputed to predict the coming season’s weather ...”

“... If a film is made of the novel – and one surely will be – Beijing may well not let the film crews in. A lavish performance of Puccini’s Turandot has been staged in the Forbidden City, which is also where Bertolucci filmed The Last Emperor, but these were both propaganda exercises for China, set safely back in the Imperial past. If the Chinese ...”

“... manhole, legs lolling down inside.Behind each tank’s barrel’s breech a metal shieldProtects crews against the strong, foot-long recoil. Nearby’sA rack for the machine gun’s ammo stack, plusTwo choking smoke-dischargers; large six-pounder shells (nose down);Hand and smoke grenades; jet-black map case; the radio setFixed at the turret’s back has a ...”

“... that the British state, of which it was a part, was one of the main protagonists in the conflict? Robert Savage believes that the corporation passed this test with honour: ‘the BBC was attacked, threatened and bullied by a variety of actors, but did its best to stand its ground and maintain editorial independence and journalistic integrity.’ But the facts ...”

“... in a mass evacuation from which many will never return. You have the firemen, the helicopter crews and the miners who fought to bring the shattered reactor under control. You have the local functionaries who kept the truth from their people; the Party politicos from Moscow who rushed to the scene; the academicians and engineers who planned the desperate ...”

“... resounded with more anti-English ardour than Surcouf, a submarine launched in 1929 and named after Robert Surcouf, le roi des corsairs, who in his long career seized more than 40 English ships. In 1940, the first shots in what Colin Smith calls ‘England’s last war against France’ were exchanged between the two navies. Before the armistice of 22 June, de ...”

“... and whose PANAMIN organisation controlled access to them from the outset. Carefully selected film crews, journalists and scientists made the trip down to South Cotabato and were arduously choppered into dense jungle to view the tribe. Imelda Marcos visited and declared herself a changed person; so did Gina Lollobrigida and Charles Lindbergh. National ...”

“... nearby Chickerell had arrived on the scene. Before you could say ‘pieces of eight’, organised crews of local fishermen were picking up the barrels, bottles and jars and loading them onto horses and carts and repurposed ploughs. People took whatever they could find. Francis Saveer, a mason, boarded the ship and managed to extract a piece of silk, eighteen ...”

“... updates, but there is no advance on Martin Arnold’s The Vikings: Culture and Conquest (2006), or Robert Ferguson’s The Hammer and the Cross (2009), or even Gwyn Jones’s magisterial History of the Vikings (1968, revised 1973). Consider the ‘key questions’ Parker starts with. First, why should Scandinavian societies have turned so suddenly to overseas ...”

“... not. The American Air Force opened up a ‘little Corridor’ at Great Falls, Montana, where 100 crews a month were taught instrument flying. The French risked Russian fury by blowing up two Radio Berlin transmitter towers which were an aerial hazard, but near Tempelhof a 400-foot brewery chimney which not even Goering had been able to move survived ...”

“... of ordnance in Aideed’s yard was firmly told to forget about it. (His discovery occurred as Robert Oakley, the President’s special representative, was wheedling Aideed and his enemy Ali Mahdi Mohamed into a hug opportunity for the cameras.) Any questions about disarmament have been met by the commanders of Operation Restore Hope with an insouciant ...”