Word: persia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more powerful - Revolutionary Guard Corps. As recently as two years ago, a senior U.S. diplomat told me, "We don't know anything about what goes on inside that government." But that has changed fairly dramatically in the past year. A special CIA Iran-analysis group, which calls itself "Persia House," was split off from the agency's Middle East regional analysts. A major effort was made to recruit human intelligence sources inside Iran. And then, in June and July, the new Iran assets began to pay off. Some of the information may have come from an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps...
...latest information. Hayden said he needed more time. McConnell set a Nov. 30 deadline. Because some of the information sources were new, Hayden decided to launch a "red team" counter-intelligence operation to make sure that the U.S. wasn't falling for Iranian disinformation. In late October, the Persia House and red-team analysts offered their findings to Hayden and his deputy, Steve Kappes, around the coffee table in Hayden's office. The red team found that the possibility of Iranian disinformation was "plausible but not likely." That assessment led two of the 16 intelligence agencies...
...Though their roots are in Persia and Arabia, the stories of Amir Hamza blossomed most fully on the Indian subcontinent - a crossroads of religions, languages and narrative styles. "When it entered India, the sky was clearly the limit," says Muhammad Memon, professor of literature and Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin. The richness of India's modes of cultural expression - particularly its blending of Sufi Islam and the mythological repertoire of the older strains of Hinduism - prompted opulent embellishments of the epic, deepening its playful world of myriad magical creatures and warlords riding rhinoceroses...
...Xingjian, 2000) Trinidad and Tobago (V.S. Naipaul, 2001), Hungary (Irme Kertesz, 2002), South Africa (J.M. Coetzee, 2003), Austria (Elfriede Jelinek, 2004), England (Harold Pinter, 2005), Turkey (Orhan Pamuk, 2006). By choosing Doris Lessing in 2007 the Academy has scored a triple: she was born in Iran, known then as Persia, in 1919; raised in Zimbabwe, known then as Rhodesia; and lives in the U.K. In its citation, the academy called her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." (An epicist, if you're curious, is a person...
Like so many writers' lives, Lessing's has been an improbable one. Her parents were English, and her father sought his fortune as a bank clerk in Persia, then as a bush farmer in Rhodesia, with limited success. Lessing bridled at their strict Edwardian mores and left school at 13 - that was the end of her formal education, although she continued to read voraciously. She left home at 15, moved to England and became associated with the Communist movement. Her writing career began in earnest in 1950 with her first novel, The Grass Is Singing...