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“... a significant component of the global economy. The word ‘disruptive’ crops up a lot in Andrew Krepinevich’s exhaustive treatise on military innovation. His contention is that the adoption of innovative military technology ahead of rivals leads to victory. In support of his argument he delves into areas usually frequented only by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Long before​ Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, many Iraqis suspected that foreign intelligence services were manipulating their country’s domestic affairs. Since the 1920s – when Gertrude Bell manoeuvred behind the scenes in the early days of the Iraqi state under the British mandate – otherwise inexplicable events were often attributed to the workings of ‘Abu Naji’, a quasi-mythical figure used as shorthand to refer to the meddling British, and later the Americans ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The​ official justification for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was set out by Henry Stimson, the former US secretary of war, in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s. There had been ‘no other choice’, he said. Had the bombs not been dropped, a bloody invasion of Japan would have been inevitable, and might have ‘cost over a million casualties to the American forces alone ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... One evening​ in early March, I stood on Rustaveli Avenue in front of the floodlit Georgian parliament in the midst of a crowd that was swelling rapidly as ever more people, including families with children and dogs, joined the protest. The demonstration had originally been scheduled for two days later, when a new law backed by the ruling party, Georgian Dream, was due to be voted on: any organisation receiving more than 20 per cent of its money from abroad would be forced to register as an ‘agent of foreign influence ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sofia Andrukhovych, Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata ...”

“... 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 ...”