A new study has found that at various times the British have invaded almost 90 per cent of the countries around the globe.
The analysis of the histories of the almost 200 countries in the world found only 22 which have never experienced an invasion by the British.
.. Mr Laycock, who has previously published books on Roman history, began the unusual quest after being asked by his 11-year-old son, Frederick, how many countries the British had invaded... “Other countries could write similar books – but they would be much shorter. I don’t think anyone could match this, although the Americans had a later start and have been working hard on it in the twentieth century.”
As It Fights ISIS, Pentagon Seeks String of Bases Overseas
The plan has met with some resistance from State Department officials concerned about a more permanent military presence across Africa and the Middle East, according to American officials familiar with the discussion. Career diplomats have long warned about the creeping militarization of American foreign policy as the Pentagon has forged new relationships with foreign governments eager for military aid.
.. Pentagon planners do not see the new approach as particularly costly by military standards. One official estimated it could be in the “low millions of dollars,” mainly to pay for military personnel, equipment and some base improvements.
.. The military already has much of the basing in place to carry out an expansion. Over the past dozen years, the Pentagon has turned what was once a decrepit French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, into a sprawling headquarters housing 2,000 American troops for military operations in East Africa and Yemen.
Edward Gibbon and the importance of great writing to great history.
How did this preposterous little man—a snob with often ludicrous opinions who was known as he grew older and fatter as Monsieur Pomme de Terre—produce The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a panoramic work of roughly a million and a half words with some 8,000 footnotes, covering 1,300 years of history?
.. Nietzsche said that a married philosopher is a joke. A married historian, productive in the way Gibbon was, is not so much a joke but perhaps an impossibility. One can be the author of a vast historical work of the kind of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was 20 years in the composing, or be happily married, but one is unlikely to bring off both.
.. “I am persuaded that had I been more indigent or more wealthy, I should not have possessed the leisure or the perseverance to prepare and execute my voluminous history.”
.. to a true writer, no experience is wasted.
.. No one who has read it will forget his capping sentence after describing the battle of Salice toward the close of the fourth century, where dead soldiers were left on the ground without burial: “Their flesh was greedily devoured by the birds of prey, who, in that age, enjoyed very frequent and delicious feasts . . . ” His hatred of war was genuine. “Military discipline and tactics,” he reminds us, “are about nothing more than the art of destroying the human species.”
.. “The novelist is the historian of the present and the historian the novelist of the past.”
.. He produced such biographies through his erudition but did so concisely through his unparalleled powers of formulation. Pope Boniface VIII “entered [his holy office] like a fox, reigned like a lion, and died like a dog.”
.. Through 20 years of solitary labor, this chubby little man also proved that the first, if not the sole, criterion for a great historian is to be a great writer.
Vladimir Putin Plunges Into a Caldron: Saving Assad
After two days of attacks directed exclusively against insurgents opposed to the Syrian government, there is little question that Russia is determined to re-establish President Bashar al-Assad as Syria’s leader.
“Russia’s goal is to defend Assad; whoever is against him is a destabilizing factor,” said Aleksei Makarkin, the deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, in Moscow. “Russia wants Assad to get engaged in a political settlement from a position of strength.”
.. Then again, as with the deal Mr. Putin engineered to rid Syria of its chemical weapons, he might manage to put together a peace deal that Mr. Obama finds he cannot refuse.