Word: acrosses
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...read for pleasure across genres? Is there a type of book you tend toward in a bookstore? I try to range freely around the bookstore. I have a fantasy of opening a bookstore, and if I ever do that, it's not going to have sections or categories. I think we should encourage people to get out of their weird little categories. Instead of saying, "I only read business books" or "I only read romance" or whatever it is that people think they read, it would be nice if everybody would graze more widely...
...word “risk”—this year’s theme—was uttered. Acceptance speeches were humorous and mercifully short, and when they weren’t, a young girl, “Miss Sweetie Poo”, marched across the stage to indicate that it was time for the laureates to wrap up. “Please stop, I’m bored. Please stop, I’m bored,” she repeated. The highlight of the Igs? Watching Elena N. Bodnar, this year?...
What was the biggest surprise you uncovered? One discovery made a real impression on me. The highest calling of any intelligence agency is to tell truth to power. The first example of this I came across is during the 1938 Munich crisis, one of the most ignoble moments in British foreign policy. MI5 at that point actually understands [Adolf] Hitler far better than the British government and then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in particular. He pays no attention to what they tell him during the negotiations that lead to the Munich agreements. So Vernon Kell [the head...
What about MI5's biggest failures? Those are related to the biggest failures of Western intelligence generally. When MI5 begins to get involved in Ireland in the early 1970s - at that point they knew less about Belfast than they did about Nairobi - well, I haven't come across a single file that relates intelligence during the Troubles that begin in 1969 to intelligence between the Easter rising in 1916 and the founding of an [Irish] Free State in 1922. Files from that previous period show that intelligence was incredibly confused, and poorly coordinated with local police. What happens...
...Syria has been slowly accommodating American and Saudi positions on several issues as well as opening an embassy in Beirut, gracefully accepting the electoral defeat of its Lebanese allies in June, and restricting the flow of foreign fighters across Syrian land into Iraq...