Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

If Mr Xi were a bird, he would be a swan.

The body had decided that the pink dolphin, a rare type sometimes seen cavorting in the territory's harbour, would be a mascot of the handover festivities.

Of the millions of animal species on Earth, only one has built a spaceship and flown to the Moon.

By the middle of the century the ocean could contain more plastic than fish by weight. There are estimated to be 5trn bits of plastic in the ocean, with over 8m tonnes of the stuff added every year.

How much LSD should you give to an elephant, should you feel minded to do such an irresponsible thing? The answer is not the 297 milligrams that was injected into a poor pachyderm called Tusko in 1962, leading shortly to his death. Tusko should have had a few milligrams, not several hundred.

If Britain had a favourite wild animal, it was probably not the fox, gallant but verminous, or the hare, magical but moonstruck, but the bright-eyed pointy-nosed hedgehog, suddenly appearing on lawns at dusk like the head of an old brush.

There are 25m tonnes of spiders around the world and that, col­lectively, these arachnids consume between 400m and 800m tonnes of animal prey every year. This puts spiders in the same predatory league as humans as a species, and whales as a group. Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of 400m tonnes of other animals. Somewhere between 400m and 500m tonnes is also the total mass of human beings now alive on Earth.

You cannot negotiate with nature.

Scientists expect almost all corals to be gone by 2050.

In 563 AD a tsunami devastated Geneva.

IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the "digital universe" (the data created and copied every year) will reach 180 zettabytes (180 followed by 21 zeros) in 2025 (see chart). Pumping it all through a broadband internet connection would take over 450m year.

Many male mammals have a bone, known as a baculum, in their penises to add to stiffness. What is surprising is that many others — men includ­ed — do not. What causes a baculum to evolve is not clear.

The ocean covers almost three-quarters of the planet. It is di­vided into five basins: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Arctic and the Southern oceans. Were all the planet's water placed over the United States, it would form a column of liquid 132km tall.

Biology's biggest division is not between plants and animals, nor even between multicellular and single-celled creatures. It is between prokary- otes and eukaryotes.

A tiger's stripes are as unique as a human's fingerprints.

The dolphin is clever, cute, kind, active and inoffensive. Exactly the char­acter of Hong Kong.

The new law that declares the Whang anui river, New Zealand's third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own prop­erty, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented. New Zealanders have been joking about whether the Whanganui might now vote, buy a few beers (how old is it?) or be charged with murder if a swimmer drowns.

Intriguingly, though, Komodo dragons appear to be resistant to bites in­flicted by other dragons.

Nature never decieves us.

If, in tens of thousands of years, a future Finn digs a 400-metre-deep well and draws water contaminated with 21st-century nuclear waste, it will be safe to drink.

An octopus's body contains 500m neurons, roughly the same as a dog's, but most of these reside in the cephalopod's arms and allow the tentacles to act independently from the brain (their arms literally have a life of their own). The type of con­sciousness experienced by an octopus, then, is wholly alien to humans.

A butterfly's wingbeat in one part of the world causes a hurricane in another.

The breast of the standard American turkey has become so en­larged by selective breeding that it can no longer mate because the male's breast gets in the way. Mr Singer describes how thou­sands of such sexually disabled male turkeys are masturbated by workers and the females artificially inseminated using the tube of an air compressor (at the rate of one every 12 seconds at one turkey farm).

He wouldn't know the difference between a bulldog and a billy goat.

Human neurons are distant relatives of tiny yeast cells, them­selves descendants of even simpler microbes.

Why humans became naked apes is still a mystery.

"When elephants mate," says a South-East Asian diplomat, "we ants get trampled." "But when elephants fight," an Australian strategist retorts, "the ants get trampled even more."

Why is bird poo white?

A mammalian brain uses about 70% of its volume for moving in­formation around, 20% for processing it and the remaining 10% to keep everything in the right place and supplied with nutrients. In doing all these things, a human brain consumes about 20 watts of power. That makes it roughly 10,000 times more efficient than the best silicon machines invented by those brains.

At the turn of the 20th century, the most malodorous environmental chal­lenge facing the world's big cities was not slums, sewage or soot; it was horse dung. In London in 1900, an estimated 300,000 horses pulled cabs and omnibuses, as well as carts, drays and haywains, leaving a swamp of manure in their wake. The citizens of New York, which was home to 100,000 horses, suffered the same blight; they had to navigate rivers of muck when it rained, and fly-infested dungheaps when the sun shone. At the first international urban-planning conference, held in New York in 1898, manure was at the top of the agenda. No remedies could be found, and the disappointed delegates returned home a week early.

The UN's Environmental Programme also estimates that the harsh climate claims 230,000 lives annually in west Asia (the Ara­bian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent), making it a bigger killer than war. Things are so bad that even Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group, is preaching the virtues of solar panels.

Even the gentle triceratops sometimes used its horns to charge predators.

Do parrots actually understand what they are saying?

Over half of the 1,400 known human pathogens have their origins in ani­mals such as pigs, bats, chickens and other birds.

Success is a delicate flower that can easily be killed.

Giant clams, Tridacna gigas, up to a metre across, required two or even four men to carry. The bivalves spilled out of the holds. Giant clams are one of Buddhism's "seven treasures", along with gold and lapis lazuli. China's new rich prize their shells as showy ornaments.

What is the IQ of a chimpanzee? Or a worm? Or a game-show- winning computer program?

"When you open the window, both fresh air and flies come in," said Deng Xiaoping.

People shed bacteria — from their skin, mouths, noses and other orifices — at a rate of about 1m an hour.

There are around 2,000 species of dung beetle. All, though, live their lives around faeces. In the case of Onthophagus Sagittarius, each female con­structs a tunnel after she has mated and then packs it with the stuff in the form of a brooding ball, on which she lays her eggs. Her mate guards the entrance, fighting other males to stop them entering the tunnel and cuckolding him. Tunnels are often so close together, however, that other females may break in to their neighbours' underground, to try to steal dung. Females, therefore, are constantly in conflict with other females, which is why they need horns. This is no struggle to possess the opposite sex, so does it qualify as sexual selection?

Take leafcutter ants. They have four distinct castes, each with their own life tasks. They practise agriculture with a species of fungus that they have domesticated to the point that it can no longer survive without the ants' care. Their agricultural ways resemble an assembly line, with different ants doing different jobs. The ants have huge colonies with millions of citizens all co­operating. One found in Brazil covered 500 square feet and ex­tended 26 feet below the surface.

If you poke a bear you had better show up with the right sort of stick.

In a competition to find the world's least-loved animal, the mos­quito would be hard to beat.

The dinosaurs, as every schoolchild knows, died out 66m years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period. But there is an argument about wheth­er they went with a bang or a whimper.

A Go board's size means that the number of games that can be played on it is enormous: a rough-and-ready guess gives around 10¹⁷⁰. Analogies fail when trying to describe such a number. It is nearly a hundred of orders of magnitude more than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is somewhere in the region of 10⁸⁰.

"First, get the cow out of the ditch. Second, find out how the cow got into the ditch. Third, make sure you do whatever it takes so the cow doesn't go into the ditch again." This is the homely advice that Anne Mulcahy, the former boss of Xerox, says became her mantra as she fought (suc­cessfully) to revive the fortunes of the copying and printing.

Interestingly, the genetically modified mice still showed the clas­sic male-mating repertoire — mounting, penetration and ejacu­lation. But the researchers noted that they mounted less often, were less apt to penetrate and did not stick at it for as long as the normal mice.

Trees can fall as well as rise.

An average elephant living in and around Samburu National Re­serve, in northern Kenya, ranges over 1,500 square kilometres during the course of a year, and may travel as much as 60km a day.

Despite its ambitious title, Charles Darwin's master work did not really explain "the origin of species". Rather, it explained how species change, which is not quite the same thing.

Shave a chimpanzee and you will find that beneath its hairy coat its skin is white. Human skin, though, was almost always black.

Perhaps it was also because she was a woman, expected to keep her house spotless, that she so lamented the despoiling of Everest by climb­ers. She became a director of campaigns to get their rubbish and, es­pecially, their deep-frozen sewage moved off the mountain. The urine left behind by climbers, she pointed out, could fill 3,300 bathtubs, and 11,800kg of faeces were dug out of the snow every season.

The empires were like tigers, which even when threatened with extinction will not co-operate.

If a big wave is coming, running from it is not enough. You also have to know how far to run before it is safe to stop.

People and bees are more or less the only animals a full-grown elephant is scared of.

By 1881, the monster was winning. Jumbo came into season, a "tsuna­mi of testosterone" known as musth, when the penis emerges, tinged with green, in four-foot, S-shaped erections. Hardly family entertain­ment.

Overpriced homes are like the extravagant plumage of a peacock, an eye-catching encumbrance that only the most resourceful males can put on display.

What's a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might seem obvious. A human being is an individual who has grown from a fertilised egg which contained genes from both father and mother. A growing band of biologists, however, think this definition incomplete. They see people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems. In their view, the descendant of the fertilised egg is merely one component of the system. The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an indi­vidual, which are found in a person's gut, his mouth, his scalp, his skin and all of the crevices and orifices that subtend from his body's sur­face.

Storms that lash the modern American coastline cause more eco­nomic damage than their predecessors because there is more to destroy. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, a Category 4 storm, caused $1 billion-worth of damage in current dollars. Were it to strike today the insured losses would be $125 billion.

Ask a typical American what he thinks of goat and he'll imagine "a gnarly-looking old billy goat with long horns on top of a car chewing on an old tin can.

As a saying widely attributed to Don Quixote put it, "let the dogs bark, Sancho, it's a sign that we're advancing".

What is the commonest living thing on Earth? Tracking down a particu­lar virus in the ocean makes finding a needle in a haystack look a trivial task. A litre of seawater has billions of viruses in it.

Elephants rumble at 33Hz when they hear bees (the researchers used tape recordings, rather than releasing actual bee swarms) and at 39Hz when they hear Samburu.

The two researchers collected pieces of plastic from various sites in the North Atlantic. They then examined each using DNA analysis, and also an electron microscope, to see what was living on it. Lots of things were.

Altogether, they discovered about 50 species of single-celled plant, ani­mal and bacterial life. Each bit of debris was, in effect, a tiny ecosystem.

From the womb comes a warrior, a king, a rich man, a criminal and a killer.

Life in the world of dung beetles is fiercely competitive. After rolling up a ball of highly nutritious dung, the beetle must race off with it or risk having the ball stolen by other beetles. Strength is important, but so too is the route taken. When allowed to see only the 18 brightest stars or immersed in total darkness, the beetles took more than twice as long to exit the arena.

The new studies suggest they are right if you are a frog or a small bird. If you are a coyote or a raccoon, though, buckthorn is a good thing.

The need to identify a suitable mate is such a strong biological urge that the animal kingdom has spawned a bewildering array of courtship rituals. Hippo males fling their faeces; flatworms have penis-jousting contests; and humpback whales sing and leap above the ocean surface. Such competitive displays depend on the speed, strength and size of an animal, which is why they convey a measure of reproductive fitness.

Female bats maintain viable sperm inside themselves for months. So do salamanders. And a female shark once gave birth after six years in captivity.

Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.

A healthy adult human harbours some 100 trillion bacteria in his gut alone. That is ten times as many bacterial cells as he has cells

descended from the sperm and egg of his parents. These bugs, moreover, are diverse. Egg and sperm provide about 23,000 differ­ent genes. The microbiome, as the body's commensal bacteria are collectively known, is reckoned to have around 3m. Admittedly, many of those millions are variations on common themes, but equally many are not, and even the number of those that are adds something to the body's genetic mix.

The coyote are opportunistic eaters and will eagerly consume rabbits, rats, Canada geese, fruit, insects and family pets.

Pigeons form a far richer picture of the world than a person can manage, through three senses unavailable to humans: an instinc­tive ability to navigate by the sun, an ability to detect magnetic fields that provides them with an inbuilt compass, and an ability to hear infrasound. But if local conditions mean they cannot hear their destination, they are as lost as a driver whose satnav has suddenly failed.

Polar-bear watchers do sometimes spot their quarry chasing snow geese during the summer, when these birds have moulted and are un­able to fly. However, a quick calculation comparing the cost of doing so with the energetic gain from success suggests such hunts are not usually worth the effort. To make a profit, the argument goes, a polar bear weighing 320kg (700lb, the average for an adult) must, if hunting a 2kg goose, make its kill in less than 12 seconds. If it does not do so, then the calories it expends running after its prey will exceed those it gains from catching it — and the calculation is tipped still further in the birds' direction if the cost of the ones that get away is included. Geese and other waterfowl do, nevertheless, seem to form a significant part of polar bears' diets, for studies done in the 1960s found a lot of bird remains in the animals' faeces.

In 1967 Stanley Milgram, an American social scientist, conducted an experiment in which he sent dozens of packages to random people in Omaha, Nebraska. He asked them to pass them on to ac­quaintances who would, in turn, pass them on to get the packages closer to their intended final recipients. His famous result was that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people. In 2011 Facebook analysed the 721m users of its social-networking site and found that an average of 4.7 hops could link any two of them via mutual friends. A small world is now, it seems, even smaller.

The 30-metre, 190,000-tonne Chelyabinsk rock came close: 27,700km (17,200 miles) above the surface, inside the orbit of some satellites. It was the nearest ever recorded for an asteroid that size.

A camel is a horse designed by committee.

The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750.

Left-handed snails avoid the attentions of right-handed crabs be­cause these dexterous crustaceans find it tricky to eat lefties. For humans, the equivalent is probably those really annoying pista­chio nuts that accumulate at the bottom of the bag. They are sim­ply more trouble to open than they are worth, and are thus likely to be tossed aside.

Among spiders, the female of the species really is more deadly than the male. Lady arachnids have a well-deserved reputation for polishing off their suitors, post copula, in a manner that Hannibal Lecter might have admired. But it has never been clear why this happens. Some biologists believe it is simply a mixture of female hunger and the availability of a meal that is in no position to run away. Others suspect that the male is actually sacrificing his life for the good of his genes. In other words, his becoming a meal for his paramour somehow helps the offspring of their union.

Pull a spring, let it go, and it will snap back into shape. Pull it further and yet further and it will go on springing back until, quite suddenly, it won't. What was once a spring has become a useless piece of curly wire. And that, in a nutshell, is what many scientists worry may happen to the Earth if its systems are over­stretched like those of an abused spring.

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will al­ways glorify the hunter.

People are not the only creatures who lie. Species from squids to chimpanzees have been caught doing it from time to time. But only Homo sapiens has turned lying into an art. Call it diploma­cy, public relations or simple good manners: lying is one of the things that makes the world go round.

He was a socially dangerous warm.

The old saying that where there's muck, there's brass has never proved more true than in genetics. Once, and not so long ago, re­ceived wisdom was that most of the human genome — perhaps as much as 99% of it — was "junk". If this junk had a role, it was just to space out the remaining 1%, the genes in which instructions about how to make proteins are encoded, in a useful way in the cell nucleus, more than a century and a half after Charles Dar­win published "On the Origin of Species", biologists do not fully understand how species actually do originate. Work like this sug­gests one reason for this ignorance may be that they have been looking in the wrong place. For decades, they have concentrated their attention on the glittering, brassy protein-coding genes while ignoring the muck in which the answer really lies.

No other season quite captures the imagination as winter does.

Among the mysteries of evolution, one of the most profound is what exactly happened at the beginning of the Cambrian period. Before that period, which started 541m years ago and ran on for 56m years, life was a modest thing. Bacteria had been around for about 3 billion years, but for most of this time they had had the Earth to themselves. Seaweeds, jellyfish-like creatures, sponges and the odd worm do start to put in an appearance a few million years before the Cambrian begins. But red in tooth and claw the Precambrian was not — for neither teeth nor claws existed.

Using Viking epics, whaling and pollen records, log books, the debris shed by melted ice rafts, diatoms (silicon-armoured algae found in ma­rine sediments), ice cores and tree rings, scientists have constructed a record of the Arctic past which suggests that the summer sea ice is at its lowest level for at least 2,000 years. Six of the hottest years on record — going back to 1880 — have occurred since 2004.

The rhino horn, which is merely agglutinated hair, the same stuff as finger nails, has no pharmacological value. Yet its street price has soared to over $60,000 a kilo, more than for the same weight of cocaine or gold — a proven aphrodisiac.

New Zealand still has seven times as many sheep as people.

The 15 litres of semen from South Africa, from assorted males, would be enough to inseminate some 324 elephants and thereby freshen up the gene pool. But the elephant semen painstakingly gathered for America has been sitting in Pretoria for well over a year because of bureaucratic red tape. South African officials have been slow to grant a permit to export the semen to America simply because they have never done it before.

You know what Washington said when he crossed the Delaware? It's fucking cold.

If jelly is so fortifying, why does it wobble so much?

Cod hate cages — they don't like being handled, are very sensitive to changes in their environment and are very hard to breed.

Most commercial species have been reduced by over 75% and some, like whitetip sharks and common skate, by 99%. For all the marvellous improvements in technology, British fishermen, mostly using sail-power, caught more than twice as much cod, haddock and plaice in the 1880s as they do today. By one esti­mate, for every hour of fishing, with electronic sonar fish finders and industrial winches, dredges and nets, they catch 6% of what their forebears caught 120 year ago.

Many shallow-water species have highly evolved visual cortexes and their eyes can contain up to eight different light-absorbing photopig- ments, compared with the paltry red, blue and green which humans pos­sess. These extra light receptors give fish increased sensitivity to other wavelengths; some species can even see ultraviolet light, which is invis­ible to humans.

In Africa it is said that "even the jackal deserves to drink".

It was a Unicorn poop.

A hen is merely an egg's way of making another egg.

Before locusts fly, they march. Millions of juveniles crawl up to 500 meters a day, munching everything in front of them, in bands that stretch for kilometres. This is when the Australian Plague Locust Com­mission tries to reduce their numbers, by laying strips of insecticide in their path. But often a swarm changes direction without warning. The university group, led by Jerome Buhl, suggests that such changes of movement are mathematically similar to the behaviour of a mag­netic material like iron — which, if heated above a certain temperature, known as the Curie temperature, loses its magnetism. In both of these examples interactions between individual particles (magnetic domains in the case of iron, individual insects in the case of locusts) drive sud­den changes in group dynamics. The iron stops being magnetic. The locusts change direction.

Lobbyists are swarming over Capital Hill like locusts.

As the researchers report in the Journal of Experimental Biology, com­pared with other flying animals the fish score well at 4.4:1. This makes them more efficient than swallowtail butterflies (3.6), fruit flies (1.8) and bumble bees (2.5). Flying fish are just as effective at gliding as birds that are known for being strong flyers, like red-shouldered hawks (3.8) and petrels (4). Nighthawks (9) and black vultures (17) make more impressive gliders. When the shape of a wing creates more lift from the air passing around it than it does drag (air resistance), an aircraft will fly. And the higher the ratio, the farther the aircraft will glide. This means if you cut the engine on a small Cessna with a lift-to-drag ratio of 7:1 it would fly seven metres forward for each metre of descent.

Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.

What is bad news for rodents, though, could be good news for primates.

Whale meat is still occasionally served to schoolchildren in Ja­pan as a reminder of their culture, though large-scale whaling only really began after the war, on the orders of General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw America's occupation. The aim was to provide cheap nourishment for a famished nation. Masayuki Ko- matsu, Japan's former IWC negotiator, who is notoriously blunt and once called minke whales the "cockroaches of the sea".

Why did the turtle stick its head in a bucket?" sounds like the sort of rid­dle asked by ten-year-olds in school playgrounds. But it was also asked recently by Yuen Ip of the National University of Singapore. And his an­swer, it has to be said, is precisely the sort that would appeal to a ten- year-old. It is that turtles pee through their mouths. The question was, why?

Primates apart, few mammals employ tools. Sea otters use rocks to smash clams open, dolphins wrap sponges around their noses to protect themselves while they forage on the seabed, elephants swat insects with branches and humpback whales exhale cur­tains of bubbles to trap schools of fish; the grizzly bear, seems to be the only species other than humans to have invented the comb.

He starts at their beginning with a weighty introduction that looks at fossils dating back to the dinosaurs, the structure of feathers and the evolution of birds. From there on, the remaining chapters are captivating natural history, arranged in neatly named sections: "fluff", how feathers keep birds warm and dry; "flight", how they take to the sky; "fancy", the myriad beauty of feathers for sexual selection in birds and decoration for humans; and "function", how feather structure can inform new tech­nologies.

Nor does anyone know how to breed eels in captivity. Mr Prosek tried to keep some in a tank but they banged their heads against the sides until they had seizures and died.

It is old, rather than young, mosquitoes that are infectious. Only females can transmit malaria (males suck plant juices, not blood) but they are not born with the parasites inside their bodies. They have instead to ac­quire them from humans already carrying the disease, and that takes time. Once a female does feed on infected blood, the parasites she ingests require a further 10 to 14 days to mature and migrate to her salivary glands, whence they can be transmitted to another host when she next feeds.

He was a harmless gecko — a nocturnal and often highly vocal lizard which has adhesive pads on the feet to assist in climbing on smooth surfaces.

See that live in numbers too large to count in ways too numerous to imagine. In that context, the discovery by Curtis Suttle of the University of British Columbia and his colleagues of a critter they propose to call Cafeteria roenbergensis virus, or CroV, should not be surprising. But for those brought up on a textbook definition of what a virus is, it is still a bit of a shock. For CroV is not a very viruslike virus. It has 544 genes, com­pared with the dozen or so that most viruses sport. And it may be able to make its own proteins — a task that viruses usually delegate to the molecular machinery of the cells they infect. CroV, as its full name sug­gests, is a parasite of Cafeteria roenbergensis, a single-celled planktonic organism that was itself discovered only in 1988. Despite the recentness of its discovery, C. roenbergensis is one of the commonest creatures on the planet. It is also reckoned by some, given that it hunts down and eats bacteria, to be the most abundant predator on Earth. It is found in every ocean.

This month the White House appointed a carp tsar to oversee the campaign. But government moves slowly. Fish do not.

In any case, though dinosaurs have left no usable DNA, other more re­cently departed creatures have been more generous. Imagine, say, al­lying synthetic biology with the genome of Neanderthal man that was described earlier this year. There is much excitement at the idea of com­paring this with the DNA of modern humans, in the hope of finding the essential differences between the two. How much more exciting, instead, to create a Neanderthal and ask him?

The Cretaceous equivalent of zebra and antelopes — the victim species in every wildlife documentary about the dramas of the African savannah — were herbivorous dinosaurs called ornitho- pods.

Such tales had to be saddled like horses, and ridden for all they were worth.

The British empire is the Indian elephant in the living room and the tiger under the dining table.

I'm not aware of any vegetarian tigers.

"At the approach of the rain and the wind the swallows are busy."

Fingers are integral to art, communication, touch, love, fashion and counting. Using complex gestures the Romans could count to 1m: the word "digit" — the numerals below ten — originates from digitus, the Latin for finger. The phraseology of fingers is rich: we can have a finger in every pie, pull our finger out, twist someone around our little fin­ger, let things slip through our fingers and, if unlucky, get our fingers burned.

Fire creates evidence as well as destroys it.

He combined the cold logic of Darwinism with a military ruthlessness.

"Female baboons clearly have some Lady Macbeth issues," ob­serves the writer. "They all have male baboons that they want to become more alpha."

Coca-Cola was also bitten by a charitable bug.

Bat testes range from 0.11% of body weight in the African yellow- winged bat, to a whacking 8.4% in the generously endowed Rafin- esque's big-eared [sic] bat. (The largest primate testes by con­trast, those of the crab-eating macaque, are a mere 0.75% of body mass.) And the small balls were indeed found in species where females were monogamous (though they might be members of harems), while the large ones were found in species where fe­males mated widely.

Fifty million years ago there was no ice on the poles and crocodiles lived in Wyoming. Eighteen thousand years ago there was ice two miles thick in Scotland and, because of the size of the ice sheets, the sea level was 130m lower.

All lagoons sooner or later become either land or sea. If we fail, then sooner or later Venice too will become either land... or sea.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, visionary: "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. The dinosaur disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now con­tains spaceships, computers — and thermonuclear weapons."

What name a genuinely new species is given, though, is entirely up to the discoverer. Hence the existence of Anophthalmus hit- leri, a blind cave beetle named in 1933 after Adolf Hitler. In this context, the recent naming of another beetle after the American president is hardly a hanging offence, although Mr Bush may not be flattered by the company. But when the scientific under­pinning of taxonomy itself is threatened by politics, different questions arise. Last year, for example, there was a nasty row in Turkey between Kurdish and Turkish taxonomists over whose names should apply to some local animals. The Kurds accused the Turks of renaming several species to remove any trace of Kurdishness.

The scientific name of the beetle comes from a German collector, Oscar Scheibel, who was sold a specimen of a then undocumented species in 1933. Its species name was made a dedication to Adolf Hitler, who had recently become Chancellor of Germany. The genus name means eye­less, so the full name can be translated as "the eyeless one of Hitler". The dedication did not go unnoticed by the Fuhrer, who sent Scheibel a letter showing his gratitude.

£ £ Philosophy, religion, thinking,

wisdom, languages, truth, morality

«You must do the things you think you cannot do," said Eleanor Roosevelt.

Spellbound after visiting Constantinople in 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany wrote to his friend Tsar Nicholas II, «If I had com there without any religion at all, I certainly would have turned Mahomettan!»

The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller «Eats, Shoots and Leavers» comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated wildlife guide describing the diet of panda bears.

In Ireland people ask St Anthony to help them find parking spaces.

How did Hobbes make so many enemies?

Human ignorance is more fundamental and more consequential than the illusion of understanding.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

William Faulkner, the South's great novelist, wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past".

Nobody thinks a novel can be translated by a machine. Sales of trans­lated fiction rose by more than 600% in Britain between 2001 and 2015, and have been growing strongly in America too.

Time is such a slippery thing. It ticks away, neutrally, yet it also flies and collapses, and is more often lost than found. If scientists agree on anything, it's that nobody knows enough about time.

Crowds are often mad rather than wise.

English is the language on which the sun never sets.

Reality is less whiter than white.

Those of Norse descent who lived through the events of the 820s, would not, of course, have feared the anger of a god they did not believe in. But they might have feared they were witnessing Fim- bulwinter — three summerless years marking the onset of Rag- narok, the twilight of their own gods.

Troublemaker was his middle name.

As a Harvard philosopher, he might have no idea how to tell an elm from a beech.

INTHEBEGINNINGWASTHEWORD, and the word was run together. An­cient texts (like the Greek of the Gospel of John) had few of the devices that tell readers where words begin and end (spaces), which words are proper names (the upper-lower case distinction), where breaks in mean­ing come (commas, dashes, semicolons and full stops), who said what (inverted commas), and so on.

Who can say what order should be used to list adjectives in Eng­lish? Mark Forsyth, in "The Elements of Eloquence", describes it as: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose and then Noun. "So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word or­der in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac."

Whig histories typically focus on the progress that the state and evangelicals made in forging a Church of England: a history of the winners.

In Mark Forsyth's marvellous book, "The Etymologicon", and largely corroborated by the Oxford English Dictionary, feisty, in the sense of "spirited", is derived from "fist" or "feist", meaning a small dog. This in turn comes from the phrase "a fisting hound", where "to fist" means to fart.

The price of being on the wrong side at the wrong time was terrible.

To win an argument, Roman orators taught, first win the good­will of your audience.

One of the grammarians, Lindley Murray, wrote in 1795, in a hugely influential grammar book, that a semicolon signalled a pause twice as long as a comma; that a colon was twice as long as a semicolon; and that a full stop was twice as long as a colon. (Try that next time you read a text aloud.)

A business traveller in Istanbul may pop by the kuafor for a hair­cut ahead of a randevu with a client, board a vapur (steamship) to beat the afternoon trafik and finish the day relaxing in a sezlong on her hotel teras.

The Gregorian calendar has a number of problems. It is based on the birth of Jesus, which is not a universally relevant event; the years before Christ are counted backwards; and there is no year zero: 1BC is followed directly by 1AD.

A famous story tells how, in a previous life, the Buddha took pity on a starving tigress, who might otherwise have had to eat her newborn cubs. He sacrificed himself instead. The agonising ques­tion, however, is whether these brave acts do anybody any good at all.

Alas, just because something is irrational does not mean it will not hap­pen.

The Prophet Muhammad is even said to have shied from entering Damascus, otherwise called al-Fayha, "the fragrant", for fear of entering Paradise twice.

Sherlock Holme's maxim that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.

But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

That wraps the maple syrup of truth in the waffle of propaganda.

There's a simple rule. You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.

Any truth, it is said, passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then violently opposed and finally it is taken as self-evident.

A decent man with some liberal instincts and a lot of personal courage was just what the doctor ordered.

This Anonymous, the publishers claim, is someone who has been in the room with Barack Obama, though whether that's the men's room or a ballroom, they are not saying.

There is nothing worse than a know-all who is sometimes right.

Play the players, not the cards, he would say. Watch them from the minute you sit down. Play fast in a slow game, slow in a fast one. Never get out when you're winning. Look for the sucker and, if you can't see one, get up and leave, because the sucker is you.

He wants to sell the family silver.

At the University of Missouri at Columbia a petition drive calls for the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson, which has been adorned with sticky notes reading "racist" and "rapist", in a refer­ence to his ownership of slaves, with one of whom he fathered a child.

How could anybody dislike the notion of fairness? Everything is better when it is fair: a share, a fight, a maiden, a game and (for those who think have more fun) hair. Even defeat sounds more attractive when it is fair and square.

There are four main possibilities, given in ascending order of po­liteness. The first is a "bald, on-record" approach: "I'm going to shut the window." The second is positive politeness, or a show of re­spect: "I'm going to shut the window, is that OK?' The third is nega­tive politeness, which presumes that the request will be an intru­sion or an inconvenience: "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I want to shut the window." The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not insist on a course of action at all: "Gosh, it's cold in here."

If you preach absolute moral values, you will be held to absolute moral standards.

This is the land of smiley faces and the "have a nice day" greet­ing — Americans like to be liked.

There is life in the old dog.

Hacking is, nevertheless, a useful reminder of an old adage: if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

But being right and being seen to be right are different things.

Sherlock Holmes once remarked that: "It is my business to know what other people don't know".

Ask people what they think of statistics, or try to use some in an argu­ment, and you will often get the quote attributed to Benjamin Disraeli that lists them alongside lies and damned lies.

Odd that a meaningless phrase can be used so meaningfully by so many people.

The Cyrenaics, or egoistic hedonists v. egoistic hedonists, the Epicureans and universalistic hedonism.

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one.

Bharat Mata's iconography remained vague. Did she have four arms or ten? Was she accompanied by a lion, or a map of India? And which map at that?

A man invents a new game, chess, and presents it to hi ikes it so much that he offers the inventor a reward of his choice. The man asks for one grain of rice for the first square of his chessboard, two for the second, four for the third and so on to 64. The king readily agrees, believing the request to be surprisingly modest. They start counting out the rice, and at first the amounts are tiny. But they keep doubling, and soon the next square already requires the output of a large ricefield. Not long afterwards the king has to concede defeat: even his vast riches are insufficient to provide a mountain of rice the size of Everest. Exponential growth, in other words, looks negligible until it suddenly becomes unmanageable E (18 446 744 073 709 551 616 grains).

Not that The Economist does not occasionally face linguistic problems: a cover story entitled "The meaning of Lula" (see article) in October 2002 resulted in a huge mailbag, not from Brazilians who were impressed at our analysis of the recent election, but from Pakistanis eager to tell us that the meaning of lula in Urdu is penis.

It's the old philosophy of buying straw hats in December.

If Noah took two of every animal on his ark, he must have had dinosaurs. Could dinosaurs have fitted into a boat only 300 cubits (about 135m) long?

Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.

And yet the institution the caliphate had been in decline long before Turk­ish republicans deposed Abdul-Majid II, the last Ottoman sultan and titu­lar caliph, who ended his years in Paris painting and collecting butterflies.

A Bible in a bedside table drawer does not constitute a state es­tablishment of religion.

Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites represent­ing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Victor Hugo supposedly said, "He who opens a school door closes a prison."

One of the contractors in question is Aker, a listed Norwegian firm no more related to Reliance than Roald Amundsen was to Gandhi.

The world's 1.6 billion Muslims have produced only two Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. Both moved to the West. In the ninth century Muhammad al-Khwarizmi laid down the prin­ciples of algebra, a word derived from the name of his book, "Kitab al-Jabr".

The sight of a southerner in the Vatican will be as important, in its way, as the arrival of the first black man in the White House.

"Atheisf' has many negative connotations: irreligious, ungodly, un­holy, graceless, sceptic, doubter, and so on. But ask a question about what atheists subscribe to — rationalism, logic, science and positiv­ism — and a majority of people will admit that they adhere to such principles. Then ask an alternative question covering the prevalent aspects of most religions: "Do you subscribe to metaphysics, supersti­tion, bigotry or dogmatism?', and the majority will deny such practice.

The rulers of ancient Rome were ruthlessly pragmatic in matters of re­ligion. When a tribe was subdued and its lands added to the imperial realm, Rome would appropriate the subject-people's gods and add them to an ever-growing pantheon of exotic divinities.

There's something for everybody, which means there's some­thing for everybody to hate.

The Mormon church is probably the best-organised in the world and certainly the most cost-effective. The president and his 12 advisers sit at the top like the board of a multinational. Below them, the church de­pends on a throng of lay volunteers. Church members begin to perform in public at the age of three. They become "deacons" at 12 and are given more demanding jobs as they grow older. The faithful are expected to give 10% of their pre-tax income to the church. No one knows how much money it has, but unofficial estimates are in the billions.

Beast, a clothes shop, makes T-shirts celebrating local speech that are famed city-wide (and sold to homesick Bristolians world­wide). Top-selling shirts proclaim "Gert Lush" (slang for "good"), "Ark at ee" (look at/listen to that) and "Cheers Drive" (used when stepping off a Bristol bus).

Wanted: man of God; good at languages; preferably under 75; extensive pastoral experience; no record of covering up clerical sex abuse, deeply spiritual and, mentally, tough as old boots. It is a lot to ask, but that is the emerging profile of the man many of his fellow-cardinals would like to see replace Benedict XVI as the next pope.

After all, as most of those who have been bitten by the philosophy bug will know, philosophers philosophise mainly because they cannot help it.

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound. The real root of wisdom is this: do not assume, little grasshopper, that your prejudices are correct.

The rules we learn from Cicero are these: speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious mat­ters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people be­hind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.

Old jokes are often the best jokes, and many of the most amusing ex­amples are of terrible errors that can be made in different languages: there is fart (Turkish for talking nonsense), buzz (Arabic for nipple), sofa (Icelandic for sleep), shagit (Albanian for crawling on your belly), jam (Mongolian for road), nob (Wolof for love), dad (Albanian for babysitter), loo (Fulani for a storage pot), babe (SisSwati for a government minis­ter), slug (Gaulish for servant), flab (Gaelic for a mushroom) and moron (Welsh for carrot).

Scores of native speakers of around 50 languages, including Ara­bic, Dari, Persian, Urdu, Pushtu and Bengali, have been hired — some say the NYPD has more Arabic speakers than the FBI. It has, at times, irritated both the CIA and the FBI, who are jealous guard­ians of their turf.

Three Egypt's Coptic Christian bishops will be elected 40 days after She- nouda's death and then a blindfolded child will select the new patriarch from among the three, as ancient tradition dictates.

But being right and being seen to be right are different things.

English has a tendency to absorb foreign words and then neutralise them — ad hoc, feng shui, croissant and kindergarten are all good ex­amples — which may be why English-speakers often fail to realise quite how wonderfully subtle and evocative other tongues can be.

It is not so much the languages that have two dozen words for snow, say, or horse or walrus carcass that impress the most, but those that draw differences between the seemingly indistinguish­able. Italian, as one would imagine, is particularly good on male vanity, and French on love as a business. The richness of Yiddish for insults seems to be matched only by the many and varied Japanese words for the deep joy that can come as a response to beauty and the German varieties of sadness and disappointment.

Adam Jacot de Boinod, a BBC researcher, has sifted through more than 280 dictionaries and 140 websites to discover that Albanians have 27 words for moustache — including mustaqe madh for bushy and mustaqe posht for one which droops down at both ends — that gin is Phrygian for drying out, that the Dutch say plimpplamppletteren when they are skimming stones and that instead of snap, crackle, pop, Rice Krispies in the Netherlands go Knisper!

Now for the first time he had become conscious of the terrible mystery of Destiny, of the awful meaning of Doom.

Translation into Spanglish of the first few pages of Cervantes's "Don Quixote". It begins: "In un placete de la Mancha of which nombre no qui- ero remembrearme, vivia, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny ca- ballo y un grayhound para el chase."

Thirteen languages in Germany are on UNESCO's endangered list.

Mr Ellemann-Jensen explained the idea by reference to Hamlet: "To be or not to be, that is the question. To be and not to be, that is the answer."

Hercules, demigod and paragon of masculinity in the ancient world, was indirectly done for by his own sexual prowess — his jealous wife, Deianira.

I scoff at Tuyuca and Kwaio for having only two words for "we", inclu­sive and exclusive. In English we have three: the regular we meaning you and I, as in "we had dinner together"; the royal we meaning I, as in "we are not amused"; and the marital we meaning you, as in "we need to take out the garbage."

Travel was not just about seeing, but about being seen.

Muslims are obliged to go on the haj at least once in their lifetime. So many pilgrims want to make the journey that the Saudis now impose strict national quotas (calculated according to national populations) on pilgrims. Once arrived, they begin their rituals: the changing into simple white clothes, the tawaf or circumambulation of the ka'ba, the drinking at the sacred Zamzam well, the prescribed running and collecting of peb­bles, the shaving or cutting of one's hair and the renewed commitment to the principles of Islam.

The Christians all say that reciting the first verse of the 23rd psalm helps them enter a religious state.

Right back at you across the pond: Sprain, Bad Reportugal, Inkland, Dire- land, Not-so-Niceland, Greece Trap, Francid, Itally, Wild Turkey, Check Republic, Repoland, Slowvakia. You started this.

That approach was first used by German scholars, and then Brit­ish ones, just over a century ago, on the texts sacred to Christian­ity, using techniques honed on the writings of Greece and Rome. From small differences in the four Gospels, they drew big conclu­sions. Matthew speaks of a lamp giving light to "all those in the house"; Luke speaks of a lamp to guide "those coming into the house".

Nowadays, all the world over, people speak with accents.

Halloween bridges the retailers' gap between the return to school and Christmas.

Now that "nigger" (which he calls the N-word) has become taboo in polite society, what happens to Niggerhead Point? The author notes in passing that this cape on Lake Ontario was thus named because it was a point on the laudable underground railroad that helped thousands of escaped slaves to freedom in Canada. That interesting historical association sur­vives in the first name change, to Negrohead Point (which remains on federal maps). But to call it merely Graves Point (as New York state maps do) seems a pity. "Nigger" and "Jap" are now banned on American maps, though a Dago Gulch survives in western Montana. More puzzling to the non-American is the onslaught on the use of "Squaw", which accord­ing to some activists (though not philologists) is not an innocent word for a Native American woman, but a derogatory term for her vagina. So Squaw Peak is now set to be renamed after Lori Piestewa, the first Native American woman in the American army to be killed in combat.

Philosophers have rarely flourished on foreign parts: Kant spent his whole life in the city of Konigsberg.

Echoing ancient thinkers such as Democritus and Lucretius, they held ideas that were to prove too revolutionary even for a revolutionary age.

The apocalypse is still a little way off, it is only because the four horsemen and their steeds have stopped to search for something to drink.

Nationalism and religion can be a toxic brew.

Myth and fantasy populate the world with "othermen"— the elves, goblins, dwarfs and giants that live in the wild wood, in the cave or on the high mountain peak. Not animal, but not quite human either, they feed fear and imagination in equal quantity. Nor are such creatures merely the province of the past and the poetaster.

It is not so much the languages that have two dozen words for snow, say, or horse or walrus carcass that impress the most, but those that draw differences between the seemingly indistinguishable. Italian, as one would imagine, is particularly good on male vanity, and French on love as a business. The richness of Yiddish for insults seems to be matched only by the many and varied Japanese words for the deep joy that can come as a response to beauty and the German varieties of sadness and disappointment.

If this walking penitentiary is such a worthy symbol of religious piety, why isn't the burqa worn by men?

For broadcasters, more eyeballs mean more subscribers and advertisers.

Forecasts a decade ahead are no likelier to be accurate than a bet

on a horse.

Hell is a city much like London.

When is a Jew not a Jew? When he's a Karaite.

He matured into a man of laconic, sardonic, quintessentially Roman aphorisms: "If you think ill of others, you commit a sin. But you often get it right."

Morality is powerful stuff, and as such should be used with care.

No wonder novice writers are often at a loss, and put commas where they do not belong. The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated wildlife guide describing the diet of panda bears.

£ £ Science, technology, progress, history, civilization

Einstein: "Why is it that nobody understands me, but everybody likes me?"

Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon's law: "90% of every­thing is crap."

Privacy is also at risk. Users were appalled when it emerged iRobot, a ro­botic vacuum cleaner, not only cleans the floor, but creates a digital map of the home's interior that can then be sold on to advertisers, Standard

Innovation, a maker of a connected vibrator called We-Vibe, was recent­ly ordered to pat customers $10,000 each after hackers discovered that the device was recording highly personal information about its owners.

Three-quarters of Americans admit that they search the web, send e-mails and check their social-media accounts in the bathroom.

The GAFA, as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are collectively called, also have good arguments on their side.

Compared with the size of its brain, an elephant's hippocampuses are about 40% larger than those of a human being, suggesting that the old proverb about an elephant never forgetting may have a grain of truth in it.

For every Spotify there is a WannaCry.

Do you know how a toilet works?

Wherever David Rockefeller went in the world — and in his 35 years at Chase Manhattan Bank, from 1946 to 1981, he ran up 5m air miles — Da­vid Rockefeller carried a small jar in his pocket. It was in case he found a beetle on the way. From the age of seven, partly from his own soli­tary, careful catching, partly from expeditions he sponsored, he built up a collection of 90,000 specimens from 2,000 species, carefully labelled and stored in airtight hardwood boxes at the 3,400-acre family place in Pocantico Hills. His preference was for wood-borers, leaf-cutters and tunnellers, whose industrious activity changed the world in ways few people saw. His discreet gathering of contacts had started in the war, when he was sent to Algiers to work for army intelligence: though of junior rank, he soon assembled a list of people who knew what was re­ally going on. He also collected 131 beetles in his jars.

At the heart of myriad devices, from computers and smartphones to drones and dishwashers, a microprocessor can be found bus­ily crunching data. Switch the power off, though, and this chip will forget everything.

No one has truly understood why shoelaces come undone in the first place. Regardless of any practical benefit, though, the three researchers, are surely contenders for an Ignobel prize. That award is made every year for work which "first makes you laugh, and then makes you think". Their study of laces looks like a shoo-in.

Dolly the sheep was cloned from an udder and named after a singer noted for her ample bosom as well as her talent.

You know, young man, one day all of these will be replaced by quantum computers.

If the history of human civilisation is of the collapse of distance — from walking to horses to carriages to motorised transport to jet engines — then what happens when you take that thread to its logical conclusion, when it becomes possible to move from any one place on Earth to another simply by walking through a door?

People could spot bacteria, but not viruses, which are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Until the electron microscope was invented in the 1930s, influenza was, like the Higgs boson before 2012, a theoretical entity: its existence was deduced from its effects. In the face of such uncer­tainty, public faith in medicine wavered. People reverted to superstition: sugar lumps soaked in kerosene, and aromatic fires to clear "miasmas".

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers," Voltaire advised.

As Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, said: "If quantum physics hasn't pro­foundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."

Most of the people who buy computers don't even know what a transistor does.

By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur — gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide — than all the world's cars put together.

You can't flush your toilet over the internet.

Once upon a time the space race was driven by the competition between capitalism and communism. Now it is driven by the competition between individual capitalists.

Almost 1.1 billion websites are currently online; global internet traffic will surpass 1 zettabyte for the first time this year, the equivalent of 152m years of high-definition video.

Science is an intellectual dead end.

A 300-qubit quantum computer could represent 2³⁰⁰ different strings of Is and Os at the same time, a number roughly equiva­lent to the number of atoms in the visible universe. And because the qubits are entangled, it is possible to manipulate all those numbers simultaneously.

But untangling voodoo's spiritual and political significance from its practices was hard. Zombie powder, according to a book written by a Harvard ethnobotanist, Wade Davis, with Mr Beauvoir's help, contained a hallucinogenic plant called datura, crushed skull from a toddler's de­composing corpse, freshly killed blue lizards, and a large dried toad with a dried sea worm wrapped around it. Later research cast doubt on the efficacy of this preparation in producing lasting trances.

Amateurs talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics.

It is hard to get a scientific grant for treating faeces.

A modern Intel Skylake processor contains around 1.75 billion transistors — half a million of them would fit on a single transis­tor from the 4004 — and collectively they deliver about 400,000 times as much computing muscle. This exponential progress is difficult to relate to the physical world. If cars and skyscrapers had improved at such rates since 1971, the fastest car would now be capable of a tenth of the speed of light; the tallest building would reach half way to the Moon.

It is impossible to predict where the open-data revolution will lead. In 1983 Ronald Reagan made America's GPS data open to the world after a Soviet missile brought down a South Korean airliner that had strayed into Soviet airspace. Back then, no one could have guessed that this would, one day, help drivers find their way, singles find love and dis­traught pet-owners find their runaway companions.

"There's a law about Moore's law," jokes Peter Lee, a vice-presi­dent at Microsoft Research: "The number of people predicting the death of Moore's law doubles every two years."

Astronauts who previously went on long-term missions endured chang­es to their vision, muscle atrophy and bone loss. On the bright side, NASA reports that while in space Mr Kelly's excretions burnt up when entering the atmosphere. "Your faeces will not be shooting stars," NASA's website taunts readers who will never make it into space.

Cephalisation encourages bilateral animals to evolve brains, in order to interpret and integrate the signals from the sense organs. And bilateral animals also have linear guts, with a mouth and an anus. That is a much more efficient arrangement than the diploblastic one of expelling the un- digestible parts of food items back out of the mouth.

Unfortunately, fit microbes mean unfit human beings. Wherever there is endemic infection, there is resistance to its treatment.

Perhaps the Wright brothers' most significant achievement was that nei­ther died in flight.

Even the task of mapping a mouse brain will require 500 peta­bytes of data storage. A petabyte is 1m gigabytes. For comparison, finding the Higgs boson required about 200 petabytes. A human brain is vastly more complex than a mouse's. It has around 86 bil­lion neurons, compared with 71m in a mouse. And the wiring that links these neurons (cell protrusions called axons) is reckoned to be about 100,000km long.

Four centuries after Galileo's discovery, it remains impossible to under­stand the solar system without understanding Jupiter. The sun accounts for 99.8% of the solar system's mass. But Jupiter, which is more than twice as massive as the other seven planets put together, makes up most of the rest. Its heft shapes the orbits of the other planets, the structure of the asteroid belt and the periods of many comets.

"I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Those words, ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton, might still be spoken, with the appropriate correction for sex, by any scientist today.

There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary numbers and those who don't.

If the 4004's transistors were blown up to the height of a person, the Skylake devices would be the size of an ant.

The Newton that emerges from the manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason. The architect of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to rep­licate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained nu- merological codes.

Don't ask the barber if you need a haircut — and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

In November 1834, hundreds of New Yorkers paid 50 cents to look at Afong Moy. Moy, the first Chinese woman to arrive in America, was im­ported by Nathaniel and Frederick Carne, who hoped that her presence would make the shawls, backgammon boards, fans and other Chinese goods that the brothers were selling seem even more alluring. There she sat, her feet bound and her skin pale, from 10am to 2pm and then again from 5pm to 9pm, day after day, the performance occasionally enliv­ened when the living mannequin picked up chopsticks or spoke Chinese. Whether this marketing ploy was a success was not recorded; neither was Ms Moy's later fate. After she was taken off display she toured the east coast, met Andrew Jackson in the White House and then vanished into obscurity. The 20,000 Chinese who set out for California in 1852 re­ferred to their destination as "Gold Mountain". Many ended up working in laundries.

An artificial kidney these days still means a refrigerator-sized dialysis machine.

"If you could fuel a rocket on hypocrisy," Mike Gold of Bigelow Aero­space suggests, "we'd be on Pluto by now."

Brazil has won five World Cups but no Brazilian has won a Nobel prize.

Chief Justice John Roberts began by observing how attached Americans have become to their mobile devices: "the proverbial visitor from Mars," he wrote, might mistake them for "an important feature of human anatomy.

Mitochondrial DNA is a remarkable thing.

For every Google there are several Netscapes.

The simplest way to travel to the future is to accelerate away from Earth in a spaceship, and then turn around and come back. Some of Einstein's equations describe the relationship between the time experienced by two bodies, one of which is accelerating while the other is not. They show it passes more slowly on the ac­celerating body. If a craft made what was, from its crew's point of view, a 40-year journey away from Earth at a steady acceleration of 1g (speeding up for the first half of the outward leg, then slow­ing down, again at 1g, to reach the turning point before repeating the procedure for the return leg), that crew would find on their return that 58,000 years had passed on Earth.

Accelerating a passenger train to 300kph and holding that speed for 100km costs only about 155 ($200) in Italy, says Valerio Recagno of D'Appolonia, an Italian engineering consultancy. Moreover, regenera­tive brakes can recover much of a slowing train's kinetic energy and convert it back into electrical energy. This is hard to store, but can be transmitted across the grid if there is another train needing to accelerate within about 30km. And if there is not, Siemens has designed "static fre­quency converters" that turn electrical energy from braking trains into a sort that can be fed into the public grid and used to power homes and factories. This is now done in more than 20 locations in Germany, with a conversion loss of just 2% E.

It was supposed to give everyone a cloak of anonymity: "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog." Now Google and its like are surveillance machines that know not only that you're a dog but whether you have fleas and which brand of meaty chunks you prefer.

Civilisation is the distance man has placed between himself and his ex­creta.

It is the unknown unknowns that keep people awake at nigh.

In 2011 a developer who claimed his AcneApp could treat pimples with light from an iPhone screen was fined.

Don't you have a few numbers that stick in your head all your life for no reason at all?

It took a lot of effort to learn how to carve needles out of bone.

How small is small? In the widely used international system of units known as the SI system (after the French Systeme Interna­tional d'Unites), "yocto" is the smallest prefix. Adopted in 1991, it stands for a multiplying factor of one part in a million billion billion (one septillion) parts, which is often written as 10-24A new record for intensity was recently reported by a team using a titanium-sapphire laser known as HERCULES, which occupies several rooms at the University of Michigan. It produced a beam with 300 terawatts of power (several hundred times the capac­ity of America's entire electricity grid). But it was concentrated onto a speck a little more than one thousandth of a millimetre across — and it lasted for just 30 femtoseconds (30 million bil- lionths of a second (10-15). HERCULES takes about ten seconds to charge up for each pulse, compared with an hour or so for some similar lasers.

The plastic impostors (Synthetic Christmas trees) were invented by an American company on the basis of loo brushes.

Eager Utopians predicted that nanotechnology would one day lead to a "universal assembler", enabling scientists to build from the atomic level everything from cabbages to cars to human beings.

Palaeoethology, working out how long-extinct animals behaved, is a subject whose practitioners can never, definitively, be proved right. But that does not stop them trying.

DNA will be easily capable of swallowing the roughly 3 zetta- bytes (a zettabyte is one billion trillion or 10²¹ bytes) of digital data thought presently to exist in the world and still have room for plenty more. It would do so with a density of around 2.2 peta­bytes (10¹⁵) per gram; enough, in other words, to fit all the world's digital information into the back of a lorry. DNA has endured for more than 3 billion years. So long as life — and biologists — en­dure, someone should know how to read it.

The formula in question Tn = T1n-b) is one of a familiar type, known as a progress curve, that describes how productivity improves in a range of human activities from manufacturing to cancer surgery. Tn is the num­ber of days between the nth attack and its successor. (T1 is therefore the number of days between the first and second attacks.) The other element of the equation, b, turns out to be directly related to Tl. It is calculated from the relationship between the logarithms of the attack number, n, and the attack interval, Tn. The upshot is that knowing Tl should be enough to predict the future course of a local insurgency. Conversely, changing b would change both T1 and Tn, and thus change that future course.

Selective forgetting of the useless is as important as selective re­membering of the useful.

Nathan Rothschild made a killing with help from a pigeon bringing news of Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. Traders today use algorithms and high-speed networks to respond quickly to market-mov­ing news.

Sea gliders are small unmanned vessels which are now cruising the briny by the hundred. Gliders are also quiet — so quiet that, as one researcher puts it, you can use them "to hear a fish fart". In 2009 a glider called Scarlet Knight, operated by Rutgers Universi­ty, in New Jersey, crossed the Atlantic on a single battery charge, though it took seven months to do so.

Software developed by Probayes, a firm based near Grenoble, in France, identifies and then steers clear of drivers who are angry, drowsy, tipsy or aggressive. Upset drivers tend to speed up and brake quickly.

In December last year Newt Gingrich, then a candidate for the Re­publican presidential nomination in America, said Palestine had textbooks "that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?"... In Afghan refugee camps in the 1980s, children were confronted with mathematical problems like this: "One group of mujahideen attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that at­tack 20 Russians were killed. How many Russians fled?"

According to Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of Bri­tish Columbia, most undergraduates are WEIRD. Those who teach them might well agree. But Dr Henrich did not intend the term as an insult when he popularised it in a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2010. Instead, he was proposing an acronym: Western, Edu­cated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic.

Bronze is copper to which tin has been added; when zinc is added instead it makes brass.

An Ig Nobel was won by a group of neuroscientists who had put a dead salmon in a brain scanner and showed it some pictures. They demonstrat­ed something that looked a lot like electrical activity in the fish's brain.

Commuting by car allowed suburbs to spread, making fortunes for prescient housebuilders and landowners. Roadbuilding be­came a far bigger business, whereas blacksmiths, farriers and buggy-whip makers faded away as America's horse and mule population fell from 26m in 1915 to 3m in 1960. Now another re­volution on wheels is on the horizon: the driverless car.

Just as nobody could have predicted the impact of the steam engine in 1750—or the printing press in 1450, or the transistor in 1950 — it is impos­sible to foresee the long-term impact of 3D printing. But the technology is coming, and it is likely to disrupt every field it touches.

Lawrence Bonassar and Jason Spector of Cornell University scanned the ear of a five-year-old girl. Using that image, they print­ed a mould. They then injected the mould with rat collagen, which acted as a scaffold, and millions of cartilage cells from calves. After allowing the result to grow for a few days, they implanted it under the skin on a rat's back and left the cells to grow for three months. This produced a fair facsimile of an ear, the same size and shape as the original.

As an astronomer I scratched my head over a letter in which a reader suggested a mnemonic using your hands for distinguishing between a waxing and waning moon. He did this to point out your apparent incor­rect caption of a waxing moon in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, his mne­monic would only work in the northern hemisphere, where the moon is observed in the southern sky with the right side of the moon sunward during the waxing phase and the left side sunward during the waning phase.

A green pixel on a satellite image doesn't tell you whether it's a park or a private garden.

In 1935 Erwin Schrodinger who was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, imagined putting a cat, a flask of Prussic acid, a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, an electric relay and a hammer in a sealed box. If the atom decays, the Geiger counter detects the radiation and sends a signal that trips the relay, which releases the hammer, which smashes the flask and poisons the cat.

Scientists should be on tap, not on top.

Researchers have long debated whether the apes fight for land, or for fe­males. One lesson, which may surprise cynics, is that humans are more peaceful than chimps.

Einstein mused, "The eternal mystery of the world is its compre- hensibility," and "the fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle."

Even at the speed of light, the trip from Earth to Mars and back can be as long as 44 minutes.

At 23:28 Greenwich Mean Time on November 8th an asteroid by the name of 2005-YU 55 whizzed within 324,600km (201,700 miles) of Earth which is an astronomical hair's breadth.

Creativity depends on serendipity as much as planning: Pixar itself started life making computer parts and only dabbled in animation as a sideline.

But why blow a scientist up ostentatiously in the morning instead of removing him quietly at night?

The Taliban have always said that the foreigners have the watches, but they have the time.

IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the "digital universe", the amount of digital information created and replicated in a year, will increase to 35 zettabytes by 2020, from less than 1 zet- tabyte in 2009 (see chart); 1 zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes, or the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs.

Cars are getting cleverer, but it will be years before they can make up for the stupidity of some drivers.

This 78-character tweet in English would be only 24 characters long in Chinese: *R*- HSf^.

That makes Chinese ideal for micro-blogs, which typically re­strict messages to 140 symbols.

The president of the University of California described a university as "a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking".

Necessity is the mother of invention.

China was once a dazzling innovator: think of printing, paper, gunpow­der and the compass. If its rulers loosen their grip a little, it could be so again.

The real problem with mind-reading technology is that we could no longer deceive ourselves.

Men do, nevertheless, have the deck stacked against them by biology. One way the cards are marked is that female mammals (women includ­ed) have two X chromosomes, whereas males have an X and a Y — the latter being a runty little thing with only a small complement of genes. Females' "spare" X chromosome protects them from genetic mutations on the other one. Males have no such protection. Women are thus car­riers of, but rarely suffer from, diseases like haemophilia which are caused by the mutation of X-chromosome genes. In birds, by contrast, it is the males who have matched chromosomes while females sport the runt. As a result, male birds tend to outlive their mates. The big­gest biological difference between health of the sexes, however, can be summed up in a single word: testosterone. Testosterone is the hormone that more or less defines maleness (though women have it too, in lesser quantities). It promotes both aggression and risky behaviour. It also suppresses the immune system, which is why castrated tomcats and rams live longer than those that have not been neutered. The same ap­plies to people. A study on eunuchs found they live 13.5 years longer than men who are intact.

The resulting molecule kept the qubit in a superposition for 500 nanoseconds — longer than any other molecular system stud­ied. Unfortunately, this is still rather a short time (500 billionths of a second, to be precise), and is certainly not long enough to perform a calculation. To encourage the superposition to endure a little longer, the team repeatedly kicked the qubit with a pulse of microwaves, a technique known as "bang bang".

What can be done to keep smartphones in their place? How can we reap the benefits of connectivity without becoming its slaves? One solution is digital dieting. Just as the abundance of junk food means that peo­ple have to be more disciplined about their eating habits, so the abun­dance of junk information means they have to be more disciplined about their browsing habits. Banning browsing before breakfast can reintro- duce a modicum of civilisation. Banning texting at weekends or, say, on Thursdays, can really show the iPhone who is boss.

The charisma gene in the Castro family missed out Raul.

Theory suggests that the black holes which form from stars should have a minimum mass times that of the sun.

The iPad is, in essence, a giant iPhone on steroids.

The exploration of the solar system would not have happened, Mr Pyne argues, without the cold war on Earth.

Two researchers, each fitted with GPS navigation devices and heart-rate monitors, followed different gatherers on different days. They recorded the weight of the mushrooms each gatherer collected and where they visited. The GPS data allowed a map to be made of the routes taken and the heart-rate measurements provided an estimate of the amount of energy expended during their travels.

What the Japanese girls did one day, everyone else would do the next — Tokyo's teenagers have been called the "thumb generation".

The central claim is to what Dr Craig Venter calls the "minimal bacterial genome". This is a list of the 381 genes he thinks are needed to keep an organism alive. The list has been assembled by taking the organism he first sequenced, Mycoplasma genitalium, and knocking out each of its 470 genes to see which ones it can manage without. The theory — and the claim made by the pat­ent — is that by synthesising a string of DNA that has all 381 of these genes, and then putting it inside a "ghost cell" consisting of a cell membrane, along with the bits and pieces of molecular machinery that are needed to read genes and translate them into proteins, an artificial organism will have been created.

The lack of atmosphere in space means that missiles travel predictably, but it also means that decoys such as balloons move identically. How to identify a decoy dressed up as a warhead, or a warhead wrapped in a decoy? Critics such as Theodore Postol, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, say this problem is insurmountable, however powerful the radars and other sensors. "It is like trying to find a bomb hidden in a pile of suitcases only by looking at them, without being able to shake them and without sniffer dogs," he argues.

During the second world war computers had been built to crack codes (Colossus, in Britain) and calculate artillery firing tables (ENIAC, in America). As the cold war began, along came the perfect opportunity: the hydrogen bomb, whose construction would require detailed mathematical modelling. Von Neumann did a deal with his American military paymasters. They got their bomb, and the scientists got their computer, a key ancestor of all modern machines. The subsequent explosion of computing changed the world.

Scientific papers do not drive messages home as convincingly as the de­struction of a city.

An unmanned sampling mission to the moon is pencilled in for 2017, with the objective of gathering lunar soil and returning it to Earth. By 2025 the goal is to send a manned mission there. Imagine the symbolism, wrote Bruce Sterling, a science-fiction author, if in the coming decades a spacecraft containing several young Chi­nese (or Indian) astronauts were to land on the moon, where the group would carefully fold away the American flag planted by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and plant their own flag in its stead.

Victor Hugo: "No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come."

Named after the Roman goddess of love, Venus could have been a sister planet to Earth. The two orbs are almost identical in shape, volume and mass. Both have solid surfaces, an atmosphere and a weather system. Even their distances from the sun are not so different: Venus is about 108m kilometres (67m miles) from the centre of the solar system while the Earth is about 150m kilome­tres out. Yet Venus is far from lovely. Probes sent to the planet by America and the Soviet Union from the 1960s to the 1980s re­vealed that Venus would be deadly to humans. The atmosphere is mostly noxious carbon dioxide, the pressure at the planet's sur­face is equivalent to being almost a kilometre under water and the temperature is a roasting 465C.

Representatives of Diageo, which owns Guinness, one of the most widely sold brands of stout, approached Dr Lee in 2009. They wondered if he might be able to construct a mathematical model of the formation and growth of bubbles in stout. Dr Lee was happy to oblige. And once he had produced the model, he started thinking more about the problem.

If the ultra-Orthodox were in heaven he would rather not go there.

Genes are acquired at conception and carried to the grave. But the same gene can be expressed differently in different people — or at different times during an individual's life. The differences are the result of what are known as epigenetic marks, chemicals such as methyl groups that are sometimes attached to a gene to tell it to turn out more of a vital pro­tein, or to stop making that protein altogether.

George Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

Electrons jump between orbits or escape nucleus altogether in attose- conds — on eattosecond is to one second what one second is to the age of universe.

Two private firms are offering moon jaunts to the rich and dedi­cated. And even if the engineering can be perfected, it remains to be seen how many daredevil billionaires will be willing to spend months cooped up in a metal tube eating freeze-dried food.

He had never had enough imagination to be sacred.

Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower monster.

Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic.

His team recently managed to cage a nitrogen atom inside a buckyball (a sphere formed from 60 carbon atoms) and use its electrons as a single qubit.

In the southern hemisphere the moon is in the northern sky and its left and right sides reverse. The Economist can take solace that the original picture showing the waxing phase on the left side of the moon in Rio was indeed correct.

Before you were trying to find a needle in a haystack at least you could see the needle gleaming. Now you have to find a needle in a million haystacks."

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run," observed Roy Amara, an Ame­rican futurologist.

It is, allegedly, now the exclusive right of scientists to answer the three fundamental why-questions with which the authors pur­port to deal in their book. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? And why this particular set of laws and not some other?

£ £ War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting

Why does mankind have wars?

Mr le Carre once described Britain as a country where "failed so­cialism is being replaced by failed capitalism".

Unlike Vietnam war, which is perennially relived and relitigated, the Ko­rean war of 1950[52 is largerly forgotten in America. Yet it brought about the utter devastation of the Korean peninsula, along with the deaths of 2.5m civilians and 1.2m soldiers, among them 34,000 Americans. After a massive Chinese intervention, it ended with Korea as divided as it had been before.

As George Bush junior once memorably put it, he was not pre­pared to "fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt".

The Crimean war was certainly the most significant conflict of the se­cond half of the 19th century. If deaths from disease are included, it cost at least 750,000 lives, two-thirds of them Russian, and it triggered big social and cultural changes in all the countries affected.

Once you have heard how Phereclus died by a spear through his right buttock into his bladder, you won't forget it.

Never cheer for the coup until the countercoup has failed.

When a kid points a Kalashnikov at you, do you shoot him?

America is still unequalled in hard power. At $600bn a year, its defence spending is more than the next seven biggest spenders combined.

Had Shakespeare not memorialised the name of a small siege ex­plosive in the phrase to be "hoist with his own petard", meaning a small bomb but also linked to the French word for "fart", that would probably be gone, too.

China's government regards spy-catching as a game for everyone. In April the municipal government of Beijing started offering rewards of up to 500,000 yuan ($70,000) for finding one.

What does Islamist mean?

Antarctica is the only continent where threre has never been war.

What insight does an old soldier offer?

The job of National Security Advisor requires a cool head, a big brain, excellent managerial skills and an even temper: few have excelled at it.

The Iroquois even separately declared war on Germany in 1941.

Serious criminals are nearly all male, which is why less than 10% of the world's prisoners are women.

Schumpeter has put together a battle drill on how to cope with activists. It has four elements: know the enemy; prepare for them to attack; smother them with sincerity; and make concessions if you have to.

About 17 years ago, Mrs P received a caution for stealing a sandwich. She also stole a 99p book, for which she was prosecuted. Homeless and suffering from schizophrenia, she failed to appear in court, and so re­ceived two convictions.

How to stop people who are determined to kill?

Hannah Beech in the New Yorker likens North Korea's prickliness to a hedgehog's evolutionary strategy of showing its spines to protect its pink underbelly.

Criminals do not think ten years into the future. If they did, they would take up some other line of work. One study found that each extra year in prison raises the risk of reoffending by six per­centage points.

Japan is almost crime-free not thanks to the police, says Yoshihiro Yasu- da, a campaigning lawyer, but because people police themselves.

"When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling pow­er," Mr Allison writes, "standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen." This is the

Thucydides Trap, named after the Athenian historian who first pointed to it. The Harvard study concluded that in 12 out of the 16 historical cases in the past 500 years that it examined, the outcome was war.

So cheap and plentiful are hand-grenades that Yemenis throw them to celebrate weddings.

Roman soldiers, it is said, were sometimes paid in salt.

Who does not prefer the rifle to the blunderbuss, the scalpel to the axe?

What happens to institutions and legal processes when the dis­tinctions between war and peace become blurred and the space between becomes the norm?

With 5,000 years of sacred history touted ad nauseam by its Communist Party leaders, who is to deny China anything it wants?

The intelligence world is full of bluffs and double-bluffs — and errors. Agents misbehave. Aims change over time.

The other key principles of the Obama checklist are: sustainability (avoid commitments that cost too much to stick with); restraint (ask not what America can do but what it should do); precision (wield a scalpel rather than a hammer); patience (give policies the time and effort to work); fal­libility (be realistic about the chances of failure and modest about what you can achieve); scepticism (interrogate the issues and beware those peddling easy answers to difficult questions); exceptionalism (the recog­nition that because of its enormous power and attachment to universal values America has a unique responsibility to provide leadership in the world that cannot be ducked).

Napoleon was impressed with Istanbul. If all the world were a single state, he said, this city should be its capital.

As Hitler rolled through Europe, some Americans wondered if Britain could hold out. One military observer questioned whether the British army could handle the "high centralisation and co-ordination demanded by the machine age." Britain urgently sought American aid, which often fell short. Even before Lend-Lease, America sent Britain rifles leftover from 1919, still packed in grease, with bullets of the wrong calibre, which made them useless.

In Indonesia and the Philippines, more than 90% of female pris­oners have been charged with drug offences. In Ireland, 80% are jailed for non-payment of fines. Most Kenyans prosecuted for brewing illicit alcohol are women, perhaps because it is a crime that can be committed without leaving the children home alone. In Afghanistan, half the women in prison are there for "moral" crimes such as eloping.

America will need to act as enforcer-in-chief.

An Indonesian official announced he had found a way to save money on prisons: replace guards with crocodiles. Crocodiles, he noted, were sufficiently ferocious and more resistant to bribery.

California's treasurer, Bill Lockyer, is fond of saying that California will not default unless there is thermonuclear war.

Intelligence officers seeking to recruit a target work on four frail­ties, summarised in a CIA dictum as money, ideology, compro­mise and ego (MICE for short).

Having taken back control of their territory in Iraq and Syria, the Kurds have proved incapable of sharing it. The alphabet barely has enough let­ters to cover the acronyms of all their quarrelsome factions. A Syrian an­alyst counts 45 in Rojava alone. In Iraq there are almost as many." We're upholding Sykes-Picot borders," says one of its commanders wryly.

A retired general says that nuclear command and control during the cold war felt like "holding an angry tiger by the tail".

The incident is yet another illustration of the perils of matching first- world firepower with third-world decision-making.

As one general puts it, the American military is becoming "a Su­per Walmart with everything under one roof". Because its culture is proudly can-do, it gets on with the demands made on it without much complaint.

If a goat can get through, so can a man; if a man can get through, so can a battalion.

The major lesson of the Vietnam war is: do not rely on the United States as an ally.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Assured peace comes only at the splintered end of a long stick.

Scratch a South Korean and he will be unsure of America's commitment, ready to believe that Japan might turn aggressive again, resentful that China ignores his country's concerns and alarmed by a dangerous North Korea.

One community chopped off the sexual organs of another com­munity.

As Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th-century German field-marshal, put it: "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Or Mike Tyson, still more pithily: "Everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth".

Grover Cleveland even managed to dodge the draft during the civil war by paying $150 to a Polish immigrant to act as his substitute.

The U. S. military programme needs to overcome at least five critical vul­nerabilities. The first is that carriers and other surface vessels can now be tracked and hit by missiles at ranges from the enemy's shore which could prevent the use of their cruise missiles or their tactical aircraft without in-flight refuelling by lumbering tankers that can be picked off by hostile fighters. The second is that defending close-in regional air bases from a surprise attack in the opening stages of a conflict is in­creasingly hard. Third, aircraft operating at the limits of their combat range would struggle to identify and target mobile missile launchers. Fourth, modern air defences can shoot down non-stealthy aircraft at long distances. Finally, the satellites America requires for surveillance and intelligence are no longer safe from attack.

If a guy has been hit by 700,000 bullets it's hard to work out which one of them killed him.

Wars sound horrible in plain English, so they have always generated a smokescreen of euphemism. "Kinetic action" means "killing people". "Collateral damage" means "killing people accidentally". Politicians typi­cally use the word "kill" only to describe what our enemies do to us; not what we do to them. In a speech in May explaining his drone warfare policy, for example, Barack Obama spoke of "lethal, targeted action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces". As Orwell said, when "cer­tain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract."

We all know about Iwo Jima, but who in the West has heard of the defence of Taierzhuang, when Chinese soldiers defeated superior Japanese troops in hand-to-hand combat?

In "Year Zero" Ian Buruma tells these stories well, and highlights oth­ers too. He finds concentration-camp inmates who attacked their Ger­man nurses after liberation; a Jewish extremist who tried to poison 6m Germans; the 137 SS officers who "had their testicles permanently de­stroyed" by American interrogators.

Unencrypted e-mails are as open as postcards and using a mobile is the worst thing you can do. There is the data centre that the NSA is building near Salt Lake City, Utah. It is likely to cost at least $1.2 billion, and some expect its computers to provide five trillion gigabytes of storage. The agency did not build it to stand empty.

History suggests that, unless civil wars end in victory after 12 months or so, they tend to drag on for years.

A typical air-force stint is three to four years; some drone pilots have been serving for over six. Morale is low and burnout, high. Many pilots worry that their job is the object of scorn. When the idea of medals for drone pilots was aired last year, a retired Green Beret huffed to the Washington Times: "I suppose now they will award Purple Hearts for carpal tunnel syndrome."

More than 52,000 police officers were assaulted in America in 2012. That's 142 assaults on the police each day. And people wonder why they come across as jaded and gruff.

Mr. Obama is taking a risk. Step back too far from big sticks, and when America speaks, it may not be heard.

Cryptography is an arms race between Alice and Bob, and Eve. These are the names cryptographers give to two people who are trying to commu­nicate privily, and to a third who is trying to intercept and decrypt their conversation. Currently, Alice and Bob are ahead — just. But Eve is catch­ing up. The most developed form of quantum cryptography, known as quantum key distribution (QKD), relies on stopping interception, rather than preventing decryption. Once again, the key is a huge number — one with hundreds of digits, if expressed in the decimal system. Alice sends this to Bob as a series of photons (the particles of light) before she sends the encrypted message. For Eve to read this transmission, and thus ob­tain the key, she must destroy some photons. Since Bob will certainly notice the missing photons, Eve will need to create and send identical ones to Bob to avoid detection. But Alice and Bob (or, rather, the engi­neers who make their equipment) can stop that by using two different quantum properties, such as the polarities of the photons, to encode the ones and zeros of which the key is composed. According to Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, only one of these two properties can be measured, so Eve cannot reconstruct each photon without making errors. If Bob detects such errors he can tell Alice not to send the actual message until the line has been secured.

More than 2,000 years ago Greece was torn apart by Sparta's fail­ure to manage the rise of Athens. A hundred years ago Europe was torn apart by its failure to manage the rise of Germany. If the 21st century is to be more peaceful than the 20th, America and China must learn to co-operate better.

History is littered with powerful people undone by hubris. Julius Caesar should have ignored the cheers of the Roman crowd and paid heed to the soothsayer.

The American revolution itself was an episode in the long conflict between Britain and France.

Spooks do need secrecy, but not on everything and everywhere.

There are around 250 gangs in the capital alone, selling drugs, carrying out muggings and sometimes stabbing each other. Gangsterism in Britain has become mundane.

The first rule of modern conspiracies is that you do not talk about them in e-mails.

The Meiji slogan fukoku kyohei: "enrich the country, strengthen the army".

Imagine that Apple could sell iPhones in Brazil only if it ploughed 20% of its projected revenues there into local technology firms. That may sound absurd, but this is what happens when governments buy arms from foreign contractors. In procurement it is standard to supplement the main deal with a side contract, usually undisclosed, that outlines ad­ditional investments that the winning bidder must make in local projects or else pay a penalty. Welcome to the murky world of "offsets". Take the shrimp farm set up in Saudi Arabia in 2006 with backing from Raytheon, a maker of radar systems and missiles. Praised at first as a model offset, it reportedly struggled to keep its pools properly maintained in searing temperatures and eventually went bust. Turkey, for instance, now meets half its own defence needs thanks to such arrangements. Indirect (non- defence) offsets include everything from backing new technologies or business parks to building hotels, donating to universities and even sup­porting condom-makers.

To a man with a hammer, Mark Twain once said, everything looks like a nail.

He never protected himself, not with a gun, not even with a toothpick.

Was not Alfred Nobel an arms maker before he became a prize- endower?

St Augustine reported a convicted pirate's testy exchange with Alexan­der the Great: "Because I have only one rickety ship, I'm called a bandit, and because you have a large fleet, you are called an emperor," says the plucky seafarer.

The British war in Afghanistan in 1842 cost £ 15m — about £ 50 bil­lion ($80 billion) in today's money — and the lives of 40,000 people, 50,000 camels and at least one cat. That is still a bargain com­pared with the current conflict, which costs America more than $100 billion every year.

Calling for growth is like advocating world peace: everybody agrees that it is a good thing, but nobody agrees how to do it.

Undercover agents are often most useful not when they are spy­ing on a country's enemies, but when they are talking to them. Spies rarely provide solid answers, he says, but offer confusing bits of a jigsaw puzzle of unknown size and shape. At best, secret intelligence removes an element of surprise from foreign affairs, but it rarely makes it clear what to do.

Chippewa morning of 9/11 Mr Bush was reading "My Pet Goaf to a class of second-graders.

American commanders are fond of the saying that amateurs dis­cuss tactics, while professionals discuss logistics.

Americans like firearms. According to a report from the Congressional Research Service there were 294m guns in the country in 2007, up from 192m in 1994.

Do not underestimate the power of a piece of paper.

The Chinese military just don't understand how to do "warm and fuzzy" when they engage with the outside world.

Mr Kjos has the ambition and appetite for risk of a Viking hop­ping on a longboat and paddling off to pillage Northumberland.

The statistics of the war are almost mind-numbing. Estimates differ, but up to 70m people died as a direct consequence of the fighting between 1939 and 1945, about two-thirds of them non-combatants, making it in absolute terms the deadliest conflict ever. Nearly one in ten Germans died and 30% of their army. About 15m Chinese perished and 27m Sovi­ets. Squeezed between two totalitarian neighbours, Poland lost 16% of its population, about half of them Jews who were part of Hitler's final solution. On average, nearly 30,000 people were being killed every day. American and British generals had to eschew the dashing aggression of their Russian and German counterparts, who could squander lives with impunity. Thanks to the bloodbath in Russia, where the Wermacht was broken and nine out of ten German soldiers who died in the war met their end, they could permit themselves to be more cautious.

Some years ago, Mr Hague says, it was predicted that the world would evolve into a series of fixed blocks. The only telephone numbers needed for diplomacy would be in Washington, Brus­sels and Beijing. That has been proved wrong: the world has nev­er looked more multipolar and networked.

In war, it is said, there are no unwounded soldiers. Bombs that shatter bones also batter brains.

Military technology, unsurprisingly, is at the forefront of the march towards self-determining machines Its evolution is pro­ducing an extraordinary variety of species. The Sand Flea can leap through a window or onto a roof, filming all the while. It then rolls along on wheels until it needs to jump again. RiSE, a six-legged robo-cockroach, can climb walls. LS 3, a dog-like robot, trots behind a human over rough terrain, carrying up to 180kg of supplies. SUGV, a briefcase-sized robot, can identify a man in a crowd and follow him. There is a flying surveillance drone the weight of a wedding ring, and one that carries 2.7 tonnes of bombs.

The Iranian hostage-takers were astounded to find that, of the four CIA officers in the American embassy in Tehran, none could speak Persian.

There is no point in beating a dead snake.

International Herald Tribune, Jan. 2, 1985: Excerpt from Hitler's speech at the 1935 New Year's reception in Berlin for the diplomatic corps: "The German people and its government are determined to contribute their best to the shaping of international relations which will guarantee hon­est cooperation on the basis of equality for all and which alone will en­sure the progress and welfare of the community".

Guerrilla warfare, however, is harder to model than open battle of this sort, and the civil insurrection that often precedes it is harder still. Which, from the generals' point of view, is a pity, because such conflict is the dominant form of strife these days. The reason for the difficulty is that the fuel of popular uprisings is not hardware, but social factors of a type that computer pro­grammers find it difficult to capture in their algorithms. Ana­lysing the emotional temperature of postings on Facebook and Twitter, or the telephone traffic between groups of villages, is always going to be a harder task than analysing physics-based data like a tank's firing range or an army's stocks of ammuni­tion and fuel.

A mass rally in Pyongyang this week to swear allegiance to Mr Kim jun­ior on behalf of the 1.2m members of the army, made the pledge to "wipe out the enemies to the last one if they intrude into the inviolable sky, land and seas of the country even 0.001mm."

When the tribes of ancient Israel defeated the Midianites, the vic­tors got the losers' 675,000 sheep, 72,000 oxen, 61,000 asses and 32,000 female virgins (males and non-virgin women were slaugh­tered), as well as the gold and jewels. The biblical account sug­gests that, in that era at least, this was a standard post-conflict resolution of property questions.

Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments (Frederick the Great).

What matters is the ability to knit everything together on the bat­tlefield through what the Chinese called "informatisation" and what is known in the West as "unified C4ISR". (The four Cs are command, control, communications, and computers; ISR stands for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; the Pentagon loves its abbreviations.)

I refer you to some apt lines uttered by Orson Welles in "The Third Man": "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

The memos gave the CIA licence to use "enhanced" techniques derived from American training advice to pilots and other per­sonnel on how to withstand torture if they should fall into enemy hands. They are shocking for their bureaucratic punctiliousness. They parse the degrees of pain that would constitute forbidden torture ("an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious physical injury"). They set out in incongruous detail the limits of abuse. A prisoner could be deprived of sleep, but for no more than 180 hours before being allowed to rest for eight. He could be stripped naked but only if the room was warmer than 68°F (20 °C). He could be doused in water but it had to be potable. He could be waterboarded with cold (saline) water poured onto his face but each application should not last more than 40 seconds, there should be no more than six applications per session, no session could last more than two hours and there could be only two ses­sions in 24 hours. One prisoner, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the operational head of the September 11th 2001 attacks on America, was waterboarded 183 times.

The world is more stable when one nation dominates, especially when it is a nation like America. If American leadership does collapse, what then.

You cannot make war on war and on your neighbor at the same time.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi had to pack his bags to leave Hiroshima after a three-month assignment as an engineer in the Mitsubishi shipyard; there were goodbyes to say at the office, then a 200-mile train journey back to Nagasaki to his wife Hisako and Katsutoshi, his baby son. It was a beautiful August day and he noticed an aircraft circling, and two parachutes dropping down. His status was recognised by the Japanese government: he became officially (though there had been more than 100 others) the only nijyuu hibakusha, or twice-victim of the atom bomb.

America is estimated to have over 33,000 gangs, with approxi­mately 1.4m members; the great bulk of these are in cities.

Teddy Roosevelt's advice to speak softly and carry a big stick.

American Congressman says he is a friend on Monday and sends money to extremists on Tuesday.

He made wild bets, too, on anything, as long as he was likely to win. He bet on which of five sugar cubes a fly would land on; whether a stray cat could carry a Coke bottle across a room; whether he could beat Bobby Riggs at table tennis played with iron skillets, and Minnesota Fats at pool with a broom; whether he dared ride a camel through the fanciest casino in Marakesh, and whether he could hang on to a horse's tail for a quarter of a mile. He won them all until, as the song said, even the Devil wouldn't bet with him.

That Chongqing's dirty linen was aired in front of American dip­lomats on his watch may matter more than the dirt itself.

The telegraph operator — incoming telegrams to large Berlin banks — orders of securities to be purchased — speculator informed first.

Even given more money, soldiers and equipment, the formula for success in foreign wars remains mysterious. Iraq, Afghanistan and even Libya have hardly been unqualified successes for West­ern intervention.

The United States then made some 30 military interventions in and around the Caribbean in the next 30 years, many of them under Smedley Butler, a marine corps general, who summed up his career thus: "I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico.safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to col­lect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12.1 brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

As Carl von Clausewitz, a great Prussian strategist, put it: "War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a con­tinuation of political intercourse carried on with other means."

He had been born during the war, grown up during the misery of the inflation and the restlessness of the postwar years, and had awakened during a new war.

At weekends, a handy man with a spanner, he would get under the hood of neighbours' cars and mend children's bikes. His ranch- style house in Seven Hills sat on half an acre, where he proudly grew tomatoes and zucchini. From 1977 to 1993, however, he be­came Ivan the Terrible, who had roamed the concentration camp at Treblinka in Poland with a whip, or a sword, in his big mechan­ic's hands. As the naked Jews ran shivering from the trains to the gas chambers he would slash off an ear, rip open a belly, or flog them til they fell. He drilled the anus of one man with an auger, and shoved the face of another hard into barbed wire. An expert on engines, he had operated the diesels that pumped out carbon monoxide to kill 870,000 people.

The country was the original home of the young man with explosive underpants who tried to blow up an American airliner over Detroit at Christmas.

When it comes to a 30-year partner of the United States, a man who has helped keep peace in the region and been a durable ally

in the war on terrorism, Mr. Obama is quick to toss Mr. Mubarak under the bus.

We've been studying nuclear waste for 40 years and we still have no idea what to do with it.

There is a long tradition of shooting messengers who bring bad news.

The bomber always get through. Charles Portal was thrilled to learn in 1944 that a single Lancaster bomber had eliminated more German man- hours on its first sortie than the number of British man-hours required to build it, suggesting that all subsequent sorties would be "clear profit".

Swastika — to some a 5,000-year-old symbol of peace — Sanskrit svastika — "good-luck sign," from svasti "good luck".

Next time you bury a beet bottle stuffed with money in a park, you should ponder what cameras and sensors may be hidden in the trees nearby. Like so many other once-solid professions, spying is becoming less of a career and more a job for freelancers.

Precedent suggests that voters unhappy about the economy will dump successful war leaders. The first George Bush's triumph in the first Gulf war did not win him a second term. British vot­ers turfed out Winston Churchill two months after his victory against Hitler. And Mr Obama has not "won" the war against al- Qaeda. Killing Mr bin Laden has scotched the snake, not killed it.

NATO was making in Afghanistan the best of a bad job.

General Tommy Franks describes him as the "dumbest fucking guy on the planet".

George Bush repeated like a scratched gramophone record that Ameri­cans were at war with the terrorists who had attacked them on 9/11, not at war with Islam.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese general, was writing "The Art of War", a book that celebrates cunning by arguing that the way to win is by al­ways doing the opposite of what your opponent expects.

Could Mrs Thatcher have survived as prime minister had the Falklands not been retaken? (In her memoirs, she says not.) Would the Tories have won the 1983 election had Argentina never invaded? (Probably). Lady Thatcher's victory suggested that war could achieve political ends quickly and efficiently.

In 1993 Colin Powell (then the top soldier) told the Senate that when the world dialled 911, the emergency phone number, Ame­rica was expected to answer.

The odour of a police station like the ammoniac smell of zoos all over the world.

And to defend against the invading legions of would-be garden­ers and hotel cleaners, the US-Mexican frontier is also equipped with high-tech military gizmos, such as unmanned spy planes with infra-red cameras.

In England between the 13 th and 16th centuries, extramarital sex was policed with such energy that up to 90% of the litigation handled by church courts was about combating fornication, adultery, sodomy and prostitution. The punishments were often savage. When the Reformation got going in the mid-16th.

A weathered Middle East truism holds that, while there can be no all-out Arab-Israeli war without Egypt, there can be no long-term peace without Syria.

On April 2nd 2003, during the second Gulf war, a hundred or so Iraqi armoured vehicles approached a far smaller American reconnaissance unit south of Baghdad. Responding to a call for help, a B-52 bomber at­tacked the first 30 or so vehicles in the column with a single, historic pass. It dropped two new CBU-105 bombs, and the result shocked the soldiers of both sides — and, soon enough, military observers everywhere. While falling, the CBU-105 bombs popped open, each releasing ten submuni- tions which were slowed by parachutes. Each of these used mini rockets to spin and eject outward four discs the size of ice-hockey pucks. The 80 free-falling discs from the pair of bombs then scanned the ground with lasers and heat-detecting infra-red sensors to locate armoured vehicles. Those discs that identified a target exploded dozens of metres up. The blast propelled a tangerine-sized slug of copper down into the target, de­stroying it with the impact and the accompanying shrapnel. The soldiers in the 70 vehicles farther back in the column surrendered immediately.

In the 20 years since the end of the cold war NATO's obituary has been written many times, so far always prematurely. In a world of few dragons but a great many more snakes, it can look clumsy.

Seven of the world's eight most violent countries lie on the bloody traf­ficking route from the cocaine fields of the Andes to the nostrils of North America.

Somalia is not important until it launches a terrorist attack which makes it important.

There are over 17,000 Border Patrol agents on the border with Mexico, a fivefold increase over 1993. They patrol in cars and all-terrain vehicles, on bicycles and horses, in boats, planes and helicopters. When there are no agents around, cameras, reconnaissance drones and three differ­ent types of sensors — seismic, magnetic and infra-red — keep tabs on things. A third of the border is fenced, and most of the rest is in areas so remote or rugged as to make fences pointless or impractical. Some parts of the fence are 17 feet high, with metal plates extending ten feet below ground to prevent tunneling.

To bomb Iran's programme out of existence.

The United States then made some 30 military interventions in and around the Caribbean in the next 30 years, many of them under Smedley Butler, a marine corps general, who summed up his career thus: "I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico...safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to col­lect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street...I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

But then the army began marching in the wrong direction, and its general shot himself in the foot.

Turkish generals are down, but they are not out.

If humans, for example, were black-and-white striped then the history of intercommunal violence the species has suffered when different races have met might not have been quite as bad.

"The Godfather's Michael Corleone: "Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment."

I Since Dunblane, handguns have been outlawed in Britain, meaning that even the Olympic shooting squad has had to train abroad. Because of these strict laws, plus Britain's relative lack of a hunting culture, gun ownership is unusual: there are just 56 guns per thousand people in Britain, compared with 300 per thou­sand in Germany and 900 in America.

A firefighter's first rule of survival is "know your way ouf.

The defeats are more painful than the victories are sweet.

Napoleon: "Let China sleep, for when she wakes the world will shake."

Mr Putin uses his KGB training to cultivate those who might be of use to him. He likes to quote a remark once made to him by Henry Kissinger, whom he greatly admires: "All decent people started their careers in intelligence."

£ £ Russia, USSR, mysterious Russian soul, communism, vodka, fatalism

But what exactly makes Russia unique?

It was an old rule in Russia that the subordinate must never be cleverer than the boss.

The Crimean war was certainly the most significant conflict of the sec­ond half of the 19th century. If deaths from disease are included, it cost at least 750,000 lives, two-thirds of them Russian, and it triggered big social and cultural changes in all the countries affected.

Catherine the Great: "I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them."

Russia holds plenty of promise.

Only Fyodor Dostoyevsky can offer a double lesson on the love of God and the love of a good woman.

Not everyone will be in a condition to toast death's imminence with champagne, as Anton Chekhov did.

Killing someone, Sleed discovers, is "like winning at Russian rou­lette and having the taste of gunmetal forever on your tongue be­cause even if you win, you lose."

To the slopes clings Clee Hill village which, until it closed, had Shrop­shire's highest pub (called "The Kremlin" because, via the radar aerials on the hill, its juke box could pick up Radio Moscow).

As the news broke of the upheaval at home, Lenin became increasingly desperate. He even considered trying to reach Russia on a false pass­port, as a Swedish deaf mute. His ever-practical wife reminded him that this was bound to fail because of his habit of talking — in Russian, an­grily, about politics — in his sleep... Lenin lambasted an anti-war article in The Economist — dismissing it caustically as "a journal which speaks for British millionaires" — on the ground that the authors wanted peace only because they were "afraid of revolution".

"Hitler nudged, so did Stalin," writes Mr Sunstein.

The Russians are very good at linking two unrelated issues in a nego­tiation.

Mr Correa, who has a respectable approval rating of 42%, is not a candidate. He is counting on Lenin Moreno, a former vice-presi­dent, and his running mate, Jorge Glas, the current vice-president, to carry on his "citizens' revolution". Mr Moreno, who shares his alarming first name with 18,000 other Ecuadoreans, hopes to win in the first round by capturing the bulk of Mr Correa's support and adding to it.

The first Russian to inquire about political asylum in Britain may have been Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who wrote to Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 asking whether she would take him in if things got too hairy in Moscow. (Eliza­beth replied that he could come if he paid his own way.) Ivan never came, but England has since offered refuge to generations of Russian political exiles. Alexander Herzen, Russia's first socialist, came to London in the 1850s and published his newspaper Kolokol (Bell), which was smuggled back into Russia. Lenin lived briefly in Bloomsbury, and is said to have met Stalin at a pub in Clerkenwell. Today London is home both to Mr Putin's cronies and to opponents of his regime trying to lay the groundwork for the day it vanishes.

In cheap action films the bad guy is taken out by force. In the bet­ter sort, he falls victim to his own hubris. The great risk, though, is that Europe and Russia find themselves in a film noir, where the villain's plot fails but takes everyone down with it.

Having been caught off guard by online protest movements, many gov­ernments are now investing heavily in their web-based propaganda infrastructure. Russian government agencies, for instance, are not just good at setting up social-media bots and other spamming weapons to drown out genuine online discourse. They also employ armies of "trolls" to fight on their behalf in Western comment sections and Twitter feeds.

J. K. Galbraith, an economist, argued that there was not much difference between state planning as practised by the Russians and corporate plan­ning as practised by General Motors.

A mild winter and robust European Union policy have blunted the edge of what was once Vladimir Putin's most effective for­eign-policy weapon: the politicised export of gas.

By Khrushchev's death in 1971, more than 125m lived in the Khrushchev- ki buildings. Most were not meant to last more than 25 years (by then, presumably, the bright communist future would have dawned.

Lenin is said to have sneered that a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him. The quote may be spurious, but it contains a grain of truth. Capitalists quite often invent the technology that destroys their own business.

Biographies of Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev abound, but nobody has written seriously about Leonid Brezhnev, on whose watch the Soviet Union sank into drunken decay.

A fortuitously placed wart on the penis of the "mad monk" Rasputin, whose scandalous behaviour and bad advice helped bring about the dy­nasty's downfall, is cited as a possible reason for his success with aris­tocratic women.

Ukrainian president must choose between a rich Russian dinner with lots of vodka and with the risk of discovering that he has been captured and his car stolen.

In pre-war Russia, for example, the central bank was called the "Red Cross of the bourse" Mr Obama is using measures associated with Soviet central planning out of desperation: he cannot get climate laws through Congress, so executive orders are his only weapons.

Surely no true, law-abiding Russian could side with the enemies of his country?

Dick Cheney, or so his critics aver, became George W. Bush's Rasputin. The Russians are a sentimental lot.

On switching off the light after reading "War and Peace", Edmund Wilson, an American critic, would find his bedroom magically "full of people".

Dostoevsky wrote about the Amur region: "If only Englishmen or Americans lived in Russia instead of us!.. Oh, they would have opened up everything: the metal ores and minerals, the countless deposits of coal."

Homo Sovieticus.

Young Alexander Pushkin disports himself Odessa brothels, scandalising society first with his impromptu dinner-party versi­fying and then with a too-public affair with Lise Vorontsov, wife of the governor. As a punishment Pushkin, nominally a civil ser­vant, was asked to do some work: to write a report on a plague of locusts that was paralysing the city. Outraged, Russia's greatest poet left town.

A novelist writing about a novelist writing about an editor reading a novel: these Russian dolls might come across as merely cute.

The rule of law means the law of the ruler in Russia.

Although they seem a godless lot, many Russians subscribe to an old re­ligious fatalism. How else — in this well-educated nation — to explain the universal scorn for seatbelts, the epidemic of poisonings during every mushroom-picking season or the amazing number of winter fishermen who die each year after falling through the ice? (More than 400, some drunk, were rescued from a floating slab off Sakhalin last month; some refused to go.) There is little pressure for better safety standards. "Life is dangerous," a Siberian tour guide said recently, when asked if the ex­treme sports he recommended were risky. "No one has survived it yet."

A retailer could legally sell a second-hand "Gone with the Wind" DVD, but could not buy it cheaply in Russia, bring it to America and sell it for a low price. With the Supreme Court's ruling, that protection has been swept away.

Russian immigration officer — usually sporting peroxide blond hair, six- inch heels and an abbreviated skirt.

At a minimum a potential vice-president needs to look capable of taking over as president. This was the test Mrs Palin is deemed to have failed, despite all the knowledge of Russia she gleaned by being able to see it from Alaska.

When Dmitri Mendeleev devised his periodic table in 1869, it contained 63 elements; a similar chart in a chemistry classroom now has up to 118 entries.

Nowhere in the world matches North Korea for forced disappear­ances. Victims are held incommunicado, rendering the level of inhumanity even worse in the North Korean gulag than in that of the former Soviet Union.

Gazprom, the trading name of the gas division of the Kremlin.

The Soviet model kept capitalistic titans on their best behaviour. Now that it has gone, capitalism, with no incentive to contribute towards social purpose, is running wild. I had to teach my chil­dren the value of sharing and that lesson should not be lost on those who reap disproportionate gains that to me look like noth­ing more than psychopathic hoarding.

Words for work, money, sex, death and horrible personal habits may well tell you more about national attitudes than anything else. Why would Russian have a special word, koshatnik, for someone who deals in stolen cats and Turkish another, cigerci, for a seller of liver and lungs, or Central American Spanish a particular name, aviador, for a govern­ment employee who shows up only on payday?

Yet, throughout the cold war, Russia remained a reliable gas sup­plier. Why should things be different now? The Soviet Union was politically more predictable than its successor. "It was run by geriatrics, but we knew that one geriatric would succeed anoth­er." Russia's political stability is ephemeral. It relies on Mr Putin's will, not on an institutional transfer of power. With nationalism on the rise, it is anybody's guess who will be in charge of Russia in ten years' time.

There is an old Soviet joke that where common sense ends railways begin.

Russia could benefit hugely from a bit of warming: large parts of the country that are currently uninhabitable could become comfortable enough to live. The 25% of the world's undiscov­ered oil and gas reserves that are reckoned to be in the Arctic, much of them in Russia, would become easier to get at. Accord­ing to one estimate of the costs and benefits of climate change, by Robert Mendelssohn, a professor at Yale University, a 2.5C increase in temperature would increase GDP of the former So­viet Union by 11%.

Medvedev either earn a place in history or a footnote in the story of his predecessor.

Russian government left enough crumbs on the table to keep for­eign businesses happy.

The Russian tactic, it seems, is to keep Mr Lukashenka just above the surface, occasionally dipping him in and then pulling him out to make sure he is still breathing. But if the Kremlin miscalculates and keeps Mr Lukashenka under a moment too long, it could inadvertently pro­voke a more serious revolt.

Russia's rapprochement is fragile since it hinges on an idea of modernisation that is unlikely to succeed without liberalisation. The risk is that when modernisation fails, Russia will blame the West for sabotaging it.

There are 4 types of capitalism: state-guided (Japan), oligarchic (Russia), big-firm (US), entrepreneurial.

Mr Bell was right that the ideology of communism was doomed. In China it has given way to market Leninism. In Russia it has been replaced by kleptocracy.

There is no such thing as a point of no return in the Moscow—Minsk bat­tle, because both sides are represented not by noble knights, but cynical traders.

Legal ivory sells for around $900 a kilogram in China's wholesale market, with the average tusk weighing between five and nine kilograms. A cheaper sort comes from extinct woolly mammoths, which are periodically excavated from Siberia's tundra.

By the mid-1930s Hemingway found it easier to catch huge marlin than to write. "I am supposed to lay back and come in with 'War and Peace' or be considered a bum," he said.

Scandal that speaks volumes about Russia has snowballed re­cently.

If America did not exist, Russia would have to invent it. In a sense it al­ready has: first as a dream, then as a nightmare. No other country looms so large in the Russian psyche.

As a former Turkish president put it, "building relations with big states is like getting into bed with a bear." When that bear is Rus­sia, it is best to stay wide awake.

Часть

A

The ultra-violence that saw the deaths of 60,000 civilians over the past decade has abated somewhat — ослаблять, умерять.

Even its campaign against banks that abet tax evasion, the one financial crime it is widely reckoned to have tackled with firmness —

поощрять, содействовать.

The old stuffed-shirt politics might also be in abeyance; Face- book's policy of prohibiting hate speech was apparently in abeyance: drawings of pigs urinating on the Koran — and worse — were posted — состояние неопределенности, неизвестности.

Even uglier was the stampede, of governors and congressmen as well as presidential candidates, to insist that Barack Obama abjure his (rather paltry) plan to take in some 10,000 Syrian refugees next year — отказываться, отрекаться.

Politics abhors a vacuum and the gap between the elite and the public will eventually be closed — не выносить, не терпеть.

Widespread abhorrence of it enabled the eventual rise of prag- matists led by Deng Xiaoping — омерзение; ненависть.

II

It is inherent in human nature to seek security via special status, and it necessarily increases with time, as so ably explicated by Mancur Olson — умело; квалифицированно.

To fulfil millennial Jewish yearning to restore the tabernacle, the company is also repairing what it says are ancient ablution pools — омовение; обмывание.

European culture has been diminished by a mixture of self-abne­gation and political correctness, while declining Christian values have left most western European countries unmoored — отрицание учения.

Examples abound, from Barack Obama's online campaign to ac­tivism on Twitter — кишеть, изобиловать.

Sexually insatiable, she had two husbands and countless lovers, and neglected her children abominably; some of the book's most strik­ing passages are about "well-oiled feudal barbarity", the abominable treatment that was meted out to those who tried to escape — грязно, мерзко.

Iran is prepared under ANY circumstances to recognize this abom­ination to Islam and more specifically its Imperial Designs for the Mid­dle East — отвращение, мерзость.

Three states have banned doctors from prescribing abortifa- cient medicine remotely, as is often done in rural areas — средство, вызывающее аборт.

The government has hounded the Brotherhood, referring to its loyalists as "terrorists", to the point of removing them from above-board politics — откровенный, прямой.

Fears spread that the EU, which had found in Mr Davutoglu a sen­sible interlocutor and a channel to bypass his abrasive boss — резкий, колкий.

British prisons are not as porous as a recent rash of absconding

suggests — бежать от суда; скрываться.

A distinguished restaurateur who runs the school, tells me they come for cooking, rather than golf or abseiling, as a group activity — спускаться на веревке.

The government will be less abstemious than it claims — воз­держанный, умеренный (в пище, питье).

It also marked the moment when maths began to slip away from being part of the armamentarium of any educated person and towards the dizzyingly abstruse field it has become today — глубокомысленный, серьезный.

China's coast abuts relatively shallow seas, rendered turbid by the sediment of China's east-flowing rivers — примыкать, граничить.

Europe is abuzz with talk of a growth compact, but nobody agrees what it means — возбужденный, охваченный деятельностью.

Academe of the Oaks offers a rigorous college preparatory course of study that prepares students for future academic work — научное сообщество, мир науки.

For Mr Reddy, the ack-ack guns held no fears — зенитные орудия, зенитная артиллерия.

A vote for independence almost impossible in a region of low li­teracy and abysmal infrastructure — ужасный.

Before such honours were bestowed, many worthy of the accolade were fellows of the Royal Society — похвала, хороший отзыв.

Obama has all the accoutrements of a president-in-waiting — антураж; внешние атрибуты.

The resulting minuscule fibres accrete into a dense mesh — срас­таться.

An ever larger share of the benefits of growth accrues to owners of capital — вступать в силу (о правах, требованиях).

Mr Capriles, who came within an ace of winning a snap presiden­tial election on April 14^th — на волосок от, на грани.

Не has an асе in the hole — преимущество, козырь в кармане.

It takes time for an institution based in the Anglophone world to be acculturated in Asia or Latin America — интегрироваться.

Without such total acculturation, managing distant operations with few communications would have been all but impossible — слияние разных культур.

He is an acidulous critic of the incumbent administration and its military servants — едкий, язвительный.

There are wealthy people who contribute, and wealthy people who just accrete — обрастать, прикрепляться.

Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's clever and acerbic ambassador to the EU, wonders what European values really are — едкий, язвительный.

Calvin Klein underpants may not exactly represent the acme of spiritual, political or even material freedom — кульминация, точка наивысшего подъема.

The Hamas government that then briefly held power gave aco­lytes jobs administering government mosques — ассистент, помощник.

China will acquiesce to another round of sanctions on Iran — уступать, молча соглашаться.

After acrimonious debates over Barack Obama's appointments to head the Treasury, there was little energy left in the Senate this week for a fight — язвительный; злой.

The uproar this provoked only grew when a state-appointed ac­tuary concluded that the firm's justification for the hike was bogus — актуарий, специалист по страховой математике.

Low olfactory acuity portends a curtailed lifespan — тонкость, резкость (восприятия).

And conservative pundits are people of adamantine principle com­pared with conservative politicians — неколебимый, несокрушимый.

John Kennedy's adage that "a rising tide lifts all boats" — афоризм, изречение.

His memories are addled, but the young member of Cocaine Ano­nymous can just about recall his formal drug education — сбивать с толку, запутывать.

Slow jurisdictions, like Italy, let lawyers adduce new evidence whenever they want, allowing them to prolong a case with new submis­sions — представлять, приводить (в качестве доказательства).

Al-Qaeda is still dangerous and is adept at changing its shape — эксперт, специалист.

Hyperconnectivity exaggerates some of the most destabilising trends in the modern workplace: the decline of certainty (as organisations abandon bureaucracy in favour of adhocracy), the rise of global supply chains and the general cult of flexibility — адхократия (модель органи­зации, в которой текущие проблемы решаются группами специали­стов с различными профессиональными знаниями, подобранными в соответствии с ситуацией).

Chinese companies don't want to be mere adjuncts to foreign firms — придаток; случайное свойство.

A curious admixture of civic conscience (support of many green initatives) and Standard Oil-type monopoly practices — примесь.

Delivering the same stump speech ad nauseum; He had already spoken ad nauseam on this very subject — до отвращения.

Good fortune and adroit political management have marked Mr Howard's four wins since 1996 — ловкий, проворный; искусный.

He was using "adscititious", correctly, in letters home from his military academy at 17 — дополнительная, не основная часть.

On her tour of Europe last month, she was swaddled in praise verging on adulation — низкопоклонство; лесть.

Between detours through nanotechnology, robotics and military strategy, he adumbrated a resilient society of "Odyssean" citizens — предзнаменовать, предрекать.

Heckling politicians is rarely an effective form of advocacy — про­паганда, активная публичная защита.

The order described by the Guardian, which was issued under the aegis of section 215 of the Patriot Act, doesn't let the NSA see the content of individual calls — эгида (щит Зевса).

Barry Cunliffe has scoured those aeons of under-achievement for signs of promise and hints towards an explanation — бесконечность, вечность.

A government body that provides financial assistance to the af­fianced about 60% of women over 30 are unmarried — помолвленный.

Yet the distinction between illnesses of affluence and illness­es of poverty is misleading as a description of the world — богатство, изобилие.

The ruling Islamist parties in Morocco and Tunisia have long vaunted an affinity with Mr Erdogan's Justice and Development (AK) party — близость, родство.

Typically, you were affrighted by an attack on that most sacred of all sacred things: property! — пугать, ужасать.

Similar moves are afoot among other non-politicians — гото­виться, назревать.

But none of that is likely to put off hardcore vampire aficiona­dos — ревностный поклонник, поборник.

They came as far afield as Chicago — вдали от дома, издалека.

An ambitious trade deal with Australia has Chinese businessmen aflutter — взволнованный, возбужденный.

The debate and its aftermath dominated political news for se­veral days and has transformed the race — последствия, состояние после случившегося.

What a thoroughly ageist and offensive sub-title — дискрими­национный.

The horn, which is merely agglutinated hair, the same stuff as fin­ger nails, has no pharmacological value — склеиваться (в однородную массу).

It worked hard to prevent the countries challenging it over some or all of its absurdly aggrandizing territorial claims in the sea from gang­ing up against it — увеличивать, усиливать.

When aggregate military spending in the US rises by 1% of GDP, military spending in California on average rises by about 3% — общий, итоговый.

American politicians, aggrieved at claims that victims of terro­rism were targeted, are calling for investigations — огорченный, расстро­енный.

For some, the annual July aggro is the most exciting event in their alienated young lives — агрессивное поведение; уличная драка.

Aghast at the prospect of an American victory, panic-stricken So­viet bureaucrats turned to Nikita Khrushchev himself. "Is he (Van Cliburn) the best?" asked the general secretary. Yes, came the answer. "Then give him first prize" — пораженный ужасом; ошеломленный.

It could take the brand back to its agitprop roots — агитация и пропаганда.

The airline world is agog at the news that "something" is hap­pening between British Airways, American Airlines and Continental — возбужденный, сгорающий от любопытства.

The industry has, ahem, a long tail of thousands of smaller ones — гм!

The loss of revenue is serious and should not be airily dismissed as you have attempted to do — беспечно, беззаботно, легкомысленно.

The firms spend big sums on "thought leadership": ie, papers, books and conferences, this is not all airy-fairy theory — мечтательный; причудливый.

A brochure for the SS Great Britain airbrushed out the offending stump in the late 1990s — ретушировать.

His picture appeared on the cover of Time, chin high and arms akimbo — руки в боки, подбоченясь.

The alacrity with which people transition from enthusiasm to sour entitlement when presented with free stuff is depressing — готовность (как ответная реакция на предложение).

Yet for all the alarums and excursions, there are few hard conclu­sions to draw — звон будильника.

Now that Mr Rodriguez is 38 and a shadow of the player he once was, it has become a financial albatross — пациент, который никак не поправляется.

In local elections in 2007, the city elected a class of aldermen es­pecially close to labour — ольдермен, член городского управления.

Human beings like to think of themselves as the animal kingdom's smartest alecks — самоуверенный наглец, нахал.

A report, the fruit of six years of investigations, tracks individual members of one Chinese hacker group, with aliases such as Ugly Gorilla and SuperHard — вымышленное имя, кличка.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has threatened an all-out assault on those Sunni-majority cities — полный; с применением всех сил и ресурсов.

The July figures allay fears that this slowdown may have signalled a change of trend, pointing instead to buoyant underlying demand — смягчать, ослаблять.

Others, whose lives are blighted by childlessness or genetic dis­ease, argue passionately for the right to alleviate suffering — облегчать боль.

The supreme leader is supposed to stay aloof from the cut and thrust of mundane politics — отчужденный, равнодушный.

The breadth of his friendships is testament to Lawrence's compul­sive, almosthypnotic allure — обаяние, очарование.

It lives in sal forest or on alluvial plains among the tall thatch- grass, increasingly chased out of both by human beings and their fires — намывной; наносный.

This is an urgent, all-hands-on-deck moment — сигнал всеоб­щего сбора.

Several wily also-rans may hold the final balance of power — серость, посредственность.

Connie Mack, a congressman and senatorial candidate, wound up in an undignified altercation with Mr Gingrich's spokesman — перебранка, ссора.

There are few other sectors of education in which the alumni net­work is quite so trumpeted as business schools — выпускники (колледжа или университета.

Evolutionary difference caused by a feature of the environment — in this case ambient temperature — окружающий, внешний.

Is God ambidextrous? Мany have some combination of being gay, left-handed or ambidextrous, and poor in visual-spatial skills — владеющий одинаково хорошо обеими руками; двуличный.

Because America is holding out for a narrow ambit for any new provisions on compulsory licensing — границы.

She calls them "zombie nouns", for their habit of ambling about in packs, eating the brains of readers — неторопливая, неспешная прогулка.

The US might not find its bully-boy tactics so amenable to the world's latest tax shelter — Singapore — подлежащий (наказанию); подсудный.

Many of the stresses known to damage fetuses can be amelio­rated by better health education, nutrition supplements and targeted subsidies — улучшаться.

A weakened Pax Americana could fall apart, to be ruled by a var­ied set of despots — все, что ассоциируется с влиянием США в мире.

One hundred employers signed another amicus brief — беспри­страстный советник в суде.

A display of amity points to tougher times ahead — дружеские, мирные отношения.

Legislative business restarts amidst debate on constitution — посреди.

You can be sure that the US will be seriously considering amping up its semi-secret military campaign in Yemen — усиливать.

But Sunday's failure is likely to give ammunition to these con­gressional critics — средство нападения или защиты.

Explicit transcripts of exchanges between Mr Weiner and his vir­tual amores, one of them reportedly a porn star, are hard to live down — любовницы.

Old-fashioned R&D is losing its ampersand — амперсанд, сим­вол "&".

Much of what Mr Van Rompuy has in mind should be anathema to Mr Farage — проклятие.

It would tip the balance of the Supreme Court away from the nar­row conservative majority once anchored by Mr Scal — быть ведущим, вести.

Some drugmakers are beginning to sell ancillary services tied to their wares — вспомогательный, добавочный.

Steve Fossett was half-man, half-android — андроид, человеко­подобный робот.

The most popular genre by far is "boys love", tales of naughty ro­mances between androgynous males — обоеполый, гермафродитный.

Once all but unthinkable (for both sexes), strikes have become increasingly common. Anecdotally at least, women appear as likely to take part as men — случайный; несистематический.

He is angling for an invitation; customers were typically medical researchers angling for promotion — напрашиваться.

It's not angst that we feel here in Hamburg but plain anger — страх, тревога, беспокойство.

How transparently his animus towards George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, motivated his accusations — враждебность, неприязнь.

In the annals of political intransigence, few beat Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina — анналы, летописи.

Will 2013 turn out to be an annus horribilis for the offshore fi­nancial world? — ужасный год.

Tourists have flocked to Bilbao in record numbers ever since the Guggenheim anointed the rusty Spanish city — совершать миропома­зание.

An attractive feature of the industry's economics is the annuity­like income generated from renewals — ежегодная рента, ежегодная выплата.

Europe's debt crisis and the BP oil spill sapped business confidence and an anomalous surge in imports ate into growth — аномальный, ненормальный.

On a therapist's couch, a patient complains of heartache, work stress and a creepy sense of anomie — психологическое состоя­ние личности, характеризующееся чувством потери ориентации в жизни.

The West's response was feeble. It made anodyne pleas to both sides to refrain from using forcepurely anodyne — утешение, успокоение; отвлечение.

To stand in his anorak waiting at the bus stop, comme tout le monde — анорак, куртка с капюшоном.

In continental Europe and jurisdictions such as Panama, founda­tions and anstalts serve a similar purpose — институты.

The government's talk of a criminal investigation ups the ante in its high-stakes clash with BP — вносить долю, делать взнос.

Antipathy to the traditional role of the Fed is, quite simply, one of the worst intellectual developments to occur in either major party — неприязнь, отвращение.

It's been ten days since the last Republican debate and Rick Perry is getting antsy — беспокойный, дерганый.

Tax increases, trade deals and antidisestablishmentarianism — движение за сохранение за Англиканской церковью государствен­ного статуса в Великобритании в XIX в.

Mr. Murdock sealed his defeat by making an antediluvian state­ment of his own about rape — допотопный; старомодный.

Africa could be the anvil on which a new Chinese foreign policy begins to be forged — наковальня.

Robert Hardman, a royal correspondent for the Daily Mail, offers a convincing tour of the British monarchy as an institution, apeing the vantage point of the fly-on-the-wall documentary; They aped the Maidan protesters in Kiev with barricades made of car tyres and the distribution of food — обезьянничать; имитировать, копировать.

Each aphid commulity is founded by a single, asexually reproduc­tive female at the end of winter — тля растительная (Aphididae).

Henry Kissinger may have thought that power is the ultimate aph­rodisiac — стимулирующий, возбуждающий.

The school is also the apex of the vast global industry devoted to teaching business — высшая точка, вершина.

Dying bees are a problem, and not just for apiarists — пасечник, пчеловод.

But there are rumours aplenty of mergers and takeovers among the world's big stock exchanges — в изобилии.

It escaped no visitor that not since Mao Zedong has a Chinese leader conducted foreign affairs with such eye-catching aplomb — уве­ренность в себе, умение себя подать.

He has picked a fight over an issue that has assumed apocalyp­tic proportions for many devout Americans: gay marriage — катастро­фический, трагический.

This is almost surely apocryphal because anyone who knew Rand's work would know how much she disliked religion in almost any form; China insists that virtually all the sea belongs to it, citing historical apocrypha — апокрифический, неканонический.

The apogee came in 1980 in a hot tub at Caesars Palace in Las Ve­gas — апогей, наивысшая точка.

Derek Chollet's apologia for what he sees as Mr Obama's distinc­tive approach to grand strategy — апология; оправдание.

He harried and skewered fellow-travellers and wishful think­ers, reserving particular scorn for apologist historians — защитник идеологии, доктрины.

McCain looked apoplectic and befuddled throughout the debate — раздраженный.

The freeing of Ingrid Betancourt and other guerrilla hostages is a political apotheosis for President Alvaro Uribe — культ, обожествление.

Converts from Islam to any other faith are regarded by the state as apostates who can be put to death — отступник; изменник.

Documents are in the process of being legalised and apostiled — замечание на полях, заметка.

Mrs Clinton has now revealed that two aspects of the Trump phe­nomenon appal her — ужасать; потрясать.

And to them are appended new difficulties that he never fore­saw — добавлять, прибавлять.

White Southern Democrats have met their Appomattox: they will account for just 24 of the South's 155 senators and congressmen in the in­coming Congress — городок в центральной части штата Вирджиния; 9 апреля 1865 в здании суда Аппоматтокса командующий армией Конфедерации генерал Ли сдался генералу Гранту.

And we're glad Banyan has returned to keep us apprised of the situation — извещать, объявлять.

The opposition is weak, though Mr Biya excoriated "the apprentice sorcerers in the shadows" — подмастерье, ученик (в ремесле).

But that historical comparison, though apposite, does too little jus­tice to the momentousness of this year's choice — подходящий, годный, соответствующий.

This criticism would be apt if America were deliberately contriving a depreciation, but I don't believe that's what is happening — уместный; удачный.

Your cover ofJanuary 29th was very apropos, depicting a map of the American states with corny new names — своевременный.

This aqueous liquid then passes through tubes whose cells ab­sorb valuable chemicals, such as salt and glucose, and also some of the water — водянистый.

Paget denied having a model other than the text — but he himself had a long jaw, aquiline nose and high temples — орлиный.

The chairman of SVG Capital, set pinstripes aquiver when he said that private-equity executives were "paying less tax" — содрогаться.

But many have arbitrageurs routing cheap calls — лицо, зани­мающееся арбитражными операциями.

Laws and institutions seem to make more difference to people's worldly chances than the arcana of theology — секреты, тайны.

Intelligence agencies are using new software to handle the arcane business of comparing lists of names — тайный, скрытый.

Henry responded archly that "he had not in his realm so many persons so honestly maintained in living by so little land and rent" — лукаво, насмешливо.

At its meeting, SAFE concluded that the next phase of foreign- exchange management will be "glorious and arduous" — трудный, тяжелый.

Dissenting colleagues at the Supreme Court had their opinions described as "argle-bargle", "jiggery pokery" and "pure applesauce" — см. ниже.

Compared with the argy-bargy over health-care reform, this sum­mer's public conversation about controlling carbon emissions has been a model — перепалка, спор.

Ads in Cockney argot miss the fact that it's supposed to be con­fusing — арго; жаргон.

That was a reaction to the arid logical positivism he was taught as a student — скучный, бессодержательный.

It also marked the moment when maths began to slip away from being part of the armamentarium of any educated person and towards the dizzyingly abstruse field it has become today — невразумительный, трудный для понимания.

It helped arrest its slide into anarchy — останавливать, тормозить.

The skyline of Paris has just acquired yet another arresting fea­ture — приковывающий внимание; захватывающий.

My brain hums with the difference between an electoral and a ju­dicial arrondissement — отдел местной администрации.

In this company, the Pussy Riot case is distinguished by the fact that its members actually committed the act over which they were ar­raigned — singing in a church — even if the interpretation of it by the court, and the sentence imposed, were unjust — предъявлять обвинение.

He also dismissed the Club of Rome's prediction that the world was about to run out of food as arrant nonsense — сущий.

Now the United Arab Emirates is Berbera's latest arriviste — выскочка, парвеню.

Mr Obama's lawyers complained that Arizona was in effect attempt­ing to set its own immigration policy, and thereby arrogating a power the constitution gives to the federal government — нагло требовать.

Mr Andrew recounts how the founder of MI5, Vernon Kell, tried to dissuade Neville Chamberlain from appeasing Hitler with a report of the dictator's dreams for Napoleonic conquest, peppered with tales of Hitler mocking Chamberlain as an Arschloch (arsehole) — тупица.

George Washington was also the father of his country and the chief artificer of its independence — ремесленник; мастер.

Small groups of artisanal fishermen, registered as co-operatives, had exclusive rights to harvest loco and other benthic creatures in a de­fined area of seabed — производимый нефабричным способом.

The average hourly wage for an intern studying for a bachelor's degree in America is $16.21, though arty organisations typically pay noth­ing — претендующий на художественность.

The aristos are paternalistic, the staff deferential and devoted — аристократы.

But the Harvard-educated, arugula-munching Mr Obama is hardly a man of the people either — пережевывающий листовой салат аругула.

He decried their "indefensible" conceptual basis, and ascribed their popularity to "extraordinary" American credulity — приписывать.

Yet at this moment of ascendancy in the business world, share­holder value is under fierce attack — влияние, господство.

China, North Korea's closest ally and begrudging patron, has, at the urging of Pyongyang, ratified the ascension in its official condolenc­es — вознесение; приход к власти.

At remote Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh, Sai Baba's birthplace and the site since 1948 of His ashram, He established an airport — ашрам (хижина отшельника).

And in the rush to get absolutely everything in, the narrative leans too heavily on audience asides — отступление, отклонение от темы.

Baby boomers may look askance at Snapchat, just as millen- nials may wonder how their peers survived without smartphones — неодобрительно, с подозрением.

But, more than others, Mr Obama looked aslant at American power, seeing a need, as he put it in his first inaugural address — косо, наискось.

Govt keeps an asphyxiating foot on currency — вызывать удушье.

It made a nonsense of the much-repeated Republican refrain that he is soft on terrorism or — a favourite aspersion — "in over his head" on national security — клевета.

Do the EU members interests run parallel to those of the specula­tors and wish to see Greece kept like a fly in aspic? — заливное (блюдо).

Others see them as aspirational, embodying the poor's entrepre­neurial spirit and ambitions for the future — мечтающий добиться более высокого социального положения.

This was partly because she wanted a smoke and was seeking a large aspidistra — азиатский ландыш.

Your grasp of the actual numbers, in this, and other respects, is only matched by your assiduousness in digging them out — прилежание, старание, усердие.

An advancing wall of Zulu warriors, armed with shields and the stabbing assegais, short spears, that Shaka had invented — ассагай, дротик у африканских племен.

Russia is becoming more assertive by the day — агрессивный, чрезмерно настойчивый.

It is hard to read Churchill's words and not hear their assonance — ассонанс, неполная рифма (одних гласных).

Such anxieties are not easily assuaged by economic logic — успокаивать (гнев и т.п.), смягчать.

Yulia Tymoshenko, and her ally, Yuriy Lutsenko, are imprisoned and were barred from the ballot means "there will be an asterisk" after the election — сноска.

The deaths in a house of prayer come at a time when Jerusa­lem is already astir over the status of holy sites — взволнованный, возбужденный.

This is bright orange, more like a puree than a juice, and has an incomparable astringent and invigorating kick — вяжущий.

But Castile's place astride the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela helped it grow richer and more important — на пути.

It was politically astute to use that quote against Mike Huckabee last Christmas — умный, проницательный.

White South Africans the absolute pinnacle of sport, to prevent the veneer of social unity from being rent asunder — далеко друг от друга.

Many obstacles stand athwart the EU ambitions of Montenegro and Macedonia, as well as Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania — наклонно, косо; поперек.

But Russian social protests remain mostly atomised, posing little real threat to the Kremlin — распылять; разъединять.

That would be out of character in a people who have, since the se­cond world war, been eager to atone for the past and be good European partners — заглаживать, искупать.

While the recession certainly feels like a period of atonement for past sins, it's not clear what the actual dynamics of this atonement — расплата; искупление (греха, вины).

Workers, whose skills have atrophied from long spells of unem­ployment, out of the labour force — изнурять, переутомлять.

"Ministers, mistresses, priests, were kept in good humour by pre­sents of shawls and silks, birds' nests and attar of roses, bulses of dia­monds and bags of guineas" — розовое масто.

The attenuated primary schedule this year makes it impossible for any candidate to clinch the nomination before April — ослаблять; уменьшать.

San Franciscans may hold out their arms to the world, but many do so standing athwart their single-family homes and yelling "Stop!" — против; вопреки, наперекор.

Will you not whistle him back, attaboy — молодец!

Does Microsoft still have a big, hairy audacious goal?" — бесстрашный, храбрый.

Few elected politicians match the audacity of those who govern Vanuatu, in the Pacific islands — отвага, смелость, храбрость.

To clean up the Augean murk of Russian banks — грязный, запущенный.

Planting two bombs at the Boston Marathon is a sick, twisted act of mass murder, but it doesn't necessarily augur any more widespread campaign of terrorism — пророчить, предсказывать.

For their part, the Chinese get one of the most august brands in the business — благородный; величественный.

On Apr. 4th Barack Obama announced, to no one's surprise, that he would seek a second term in 2012. The timing was auspicious — благоприятный.

An austere individual would be someone who lives within their budget: that is, who spends less than their annual income — аскетический, суровый.

If the US had remained in financial autarky, the credit boom would have been smaller — автаркия, изоляционистское государство.

This week his optimistic pragmatism was tested in a chilly,

autumnal Moscow — осенний.

No other section of the population avail themselves more read­ily — помогать, приносить пользу.

Mysterious, suspicious, avaricious, cold, the figure of Henry VII has long been skipped over or ignored — алчный; жадный.

Now populated by no more than 84000 avatars at a time — «аватар» синтетический (анимационный) интерактивный объект, представляющий пользователя в виртуальном мире.

A prominent commentator recently averred that Mr Netanyahu is not fit to hold his job — утверждать, заявлять.

Employers are risk-averse, says Mr Stacey, and often assume that if something is flagged on a background check they cannot hire the ap­plicant — питающий антипатию, неприязнь.

His slow, avuncular tones were those of the middle class in the middle shires; Romantic-era Poland avuncularly ignored local difficulties in places like Lithuania — добрый, покровительственный.

The country has become so awash in the stuff since "fracking" (hy­draulic fracturing of gas-bearing shale deposits) began barely five years ago — пустая болтовня, переливание из пустого в порожнее.

Awestricken visitors peered at them with delight; it was awestruck by iPhone — трепещущий от страха.

Mr Bush went AWOL during his last 18 months of service in the Texas National Guard — от absent without official leave; находящийся в самовольной отлучке.

If things go awry, the government would simply print (well, not really printing just computer operations) more yens to pay the deb — кривой; искаженный.

It was once regarded as axiomatic that globalisation would mar­ginalise politics — самоочевидный, не требующий доказательства.

B

The bicentennial of his birth was the occasion for academic bac­chanalias on both sides of the Atlantic — вакханалия; пьяный разгул.

A small group of bacchanalians started opening offbeat organic wine bars across Paris — гуляка, кутила.

Backbiting could grow, not least over the young prince's readi­ness to cash in the family silver — клеветать за чьей-л. спиной.

The family firms that form the backbone of the German economy have more to worry about than recession — хребет.

Given the "lies and backflipping" from major-party politicians, and the number of prime ministers Australia has churned through (five in the past decade), why should she vote for either of them? — сальто назад, задний кульбит.

Lines of back-to-back houses in the title sequences of "Corona­tion Street", a television series, are the visual cliche — непрерывный, последовательный.

These backwoodsmen whisper in the president's ear — дикарь, провинциал.

Frances's routine is simple: chores in the daytime and "playing a couple of games of backgammon taking a cup of watery cocoa — нарды.

Many, if not most, of the graduates from the Southern California School of Architecture ended up wandering the backlots of Hollywood studios — площадка рядом с киностудией, где снимаются эпизоды вне павильона.

They don't care how many people die, because the Nationalists love the United States even after the US was about to backstab them, what a loyal dog — поступить по отношению к кому-л. предательски.

He is determined, audacious and, in a parliamentary party domi­nated by privileged white men, has a very compelling back-story —

предыстория оказывает решающее воздействие на события, проис­ходящие в самой пьесе.

Tanzania is still a backwater compared with its Kenyan neigh­bour to the north — тихая заводь; рутина; болото.

India has reservations in jobs, education for lower castes, tribes, backward caste all on the basis of race — отсталый, отстающий в развитии.

The man could be just as perplexing, and played it up — was he re­ally a badass city boy? — отморозок, подонок.

The six Bonds, Pierce Brosnan was the most bloodthirsty, bump­ing off an average of 19 baddies per film — отрицательный герой; злодей.

Mr Cameron paused to take an icy dip in a nearby lough, then he badgered Mr Putin some more — травить.

Finland, with its baffling language and culture of reserve, is not an easy place for outsiders to penetrate — непостижимый, загадочный.

TV executives responded to Tania Alexander, the programme's creator, with bafflement — сложность, трудность.

Thirty billion dollars is a lot of money for anyone except America's government and in Washington it is a bagatelle — пустяк; безделушка.

In spite of the enormous losses that took place in his bailiwick, it is odd that the FSA has chosen to single out Mr Cummings — сфера компетенции; знакомая область.

This extrapolates to about $2.5 billion worth of baksheesh nation­ally every year — бакшиш, чаевые, взятка.

Gone was all that balderdash about the sacred mystique of the Russian state — вздор, чепуха, ерунда.

Bodies were stacked up like bales of hay — укладывать в тюки.

The desire for male descendants has had many baleful conse­quences in China — гибельный; губительный.

They may even benefit from the new age of activism, which obliges managers to refine their strategies, boards to be on the ball and firms to stay close to all of their shareholders — расторопный; толковый.

Another sees two handball players snapped from behind, aloft and balletic — балетный.

The first is an essay about three people who loved ballooning in the 19th century — раздуваться, увеличиваться.

Russia's much-ballyhooed turn towards China is less than it seems — шумиха, ажиотаж.

The goalposts were already in the wrong ballpark — поле для игры в бейсбол.

No one knows the amounts of money going through the hands of Singapore Pools, but I won't be surprised, just a ballpark guessing, $100 — грубая оценка; примерное количество.

Vietnam Net and Tuoi Tre, two of Vietnam's more ballsy state- controlled publications, have run exposes of fake telepaths and spirit me­diums — напористый, пробивной.

On March 1st he dismissed dire government warnings about the risks of Brexit as baloney — чушь, вздор.

Trumpian success, in essence, rests on a talent for bamboozling rubes — сбивать с толку; разыгрывать.

The Liberal Democrats want to add one percentage point to each band of income tax to pay for extra spending on health care — диапазон, интервал.

In distressed clothing and workman's boots, his scraggly hair often tied up in a bandanna, he looked every bit the grubby savant — бандана (косынка c цветным рисунком).

Freedom is one of those words that politicians bandy around a great deal over the July 4th holiday — передавать из уст в уста; распространять (слух).

Gunmen wrapped in bandoleers of ammunition charged into crowds of Saturday shoppers — патронташ.

A bantamweight female guards at New Orleans airport; In almost every respect it is managing, as the diplomatic jargon goes, to punch far above its bantam weight — легчайший вес; «вес петуха».

When Shinzo Abe resigned after just a year as prime minister, in September 2007, he was derided by voters, broken by chronic illness, and dogged by the ineptitude that has been the bane of so many recent Japa­nese leaders — бедствие, бич, проклятие.

Under the baneful influence of racing, modern sailing yachts ex­change stability for speed — бедственный, губительный.

Thanks to the growing renewable-energy market and the subsi­dies that come with it, smart investors are now getting even more bang for their bark — окупать вложенные средства.

Tom Cruise was the most bankable asset — прибыльный.

It is fitting that 2014 should be a banner year for global trade — образцовый, показательный.

But now he is campaigning like a banshee, if such a term can be applied to such an impeccably coiffed figure — банши (фольклорный персонаж: привидение-плакальщица, чьи завывания под окнами дома предвещают обитателю этого дома смерть).

Facebook, Twitter and the like allow the kind of unimportant ban­ter that binds old friends together, and sometimes helps you make new ones — добродушное подшучивание.

Ms Fields had accused Mr Lewandowski of grabbing her and barg­ing her out of the way — вытолкнуть.

A mature firm that cannot make a profit using standard accounting rules should be approached with a bargepole — шест для отталкивания баржи.

The prime minister had promised a fresh start to 2015 by "scrap­ing one or two barnacles off the ship" — наросты.

But the barrage of grim statistics about the horrors the sequester will inflict has diminished somewhat in recent days — шквал (критики, жалоб).

Clinton and Obama traded witty barbs — обмен колкостями, шип.

Russia has us over a barrel — быть совершенно беспомощным (как утонувший человек, которого положили сверху на бочку, чтобы вода могла вытечь из легких).

By insuring a barrelful of policies, it matters less if one of them is bad — изобилие.

They insist it is barmy to start fiddling with the constitution when the country faces "a howling economic gale", as one Tory puts it — придурковатый; чокнутый; идиотский.

Depicting Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, en­grossed in a series of athletically challenging sexual activities with barn­yard animals — скотный двор.

Obama's quixotic dash to Copenhagen bashed his reputation — нанести сильный удар.

The economy of the euro area is basking in a rare period of opti­mism — греться (на солнце, у огня).

No, no," he answered, laughing, turning his head as if to bat off a troublesome fly — наносить удар.

Right off the bat, you're spending a fifth of your income on health insurance — немедленно и без подготовки; с места в карьер.

Only a few weeks after Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's boss, batted away criticism of the company's election coverage — отбить.

Darling's budget was a fittingly bathetic end to Labour's time in office — неожиданно переходящий от возвышенного стиля к вульгар­ному (от греч. bathos, «самое дно»).

First the dollar took a battering, then the euro got pummelled and finally sterling hit the canvas — бепощадная критика, разгром.

When student activists start trumpeting new causes, university administrators usually batten down — принимать жесткие меры.

He was to receive the presidential sash and baton in the Casa Ro- sada from the provisional president of the Senate — жезл, эстафетная палочка.

"Outsidethebox" must win some kind of prize for pseudonym- ic bathos — неожиданное появление банальностей в произведении возвышенного стиля.

For anyone in any doubt, the crimes of these Union officials include battery, assault, attempted murder and murder — побои, оскорбление действием.

The eccentric who is considered a genius rather than a batty re­cluse — сумасшедший, тронутый.

Insurers and their policyholders batten down the hatches as America's hurricane season begins — принимать жесткие меры.

He rolled out the latest bauble with usual flair; iPhone metal finish and high-quality components, allied with a big advertising push from Ap­ple, all helped establish it as a desirable consumer bauble — шутовской жезл с погремушкой, кисточкой.

Women were seen as vulnerable to male seduction, particularly by unscrupulous rakes who plotted with bawds to ensnare the innocent — сводник, сводница.

For FIFA to be under the referee's beady eye would be precisely the point — как бусинки.

Arriving in Argentina without a bean in 1948, he had worked his way up to become a pillar of Bariloche society — не иметь ни гроша.

In Russia the main intrigue is why Ms Vasilyeva, who got her legal qualifications only in 2009 after working as a cook (among other jobs), chose to spill the beans — выдать секрет, проболтаться.

America bearded China's leaders by sending a warship close to one of their newly built islands — смело выступать против, бросать вызов.

Why mate with a second-class beau who cannot be bothered to bring you the fishy equivalent of roses and diamonds? — денди, франт, щеголь.

Users book a space in a co-working office, plonk themselves down where they can and start beavering away — усердно работать.

Relations between the two governing parties have soured since the beatific early months of the coalition — блаженный.

They wanted to keep them at their beck and call — and not stand­ing on some distant peak with an ice-pick raised triumphant in the air — быть на побегушках.

The extra taxes levied to build the stadium will mainly come out of tourists' bedazzled pocketbooks — ослеплять блеском.

Troubles on the way to Postbank's share issue have not been the only problem bedevilling Germany's financial markets — терзать.

Even at the village level there were factions: common purpose was bedeviled by factional divides — навести порчу, сглазить.

He is a fat, bedraggled former terrorist who has been in Ameri­can custody for years — замарать, запачкать.

The trademark bedlam of a Marx Brothers scene was in fact tight­ly controlled — бедлам, хаос; Бедлам (психиатрическая больница им. Святой Марии Вифлеемской, в Лондоне).

Sport and the media are natural bedfellows — компаньон, парт­нер.

Mr Mattis said that the administration strongly supports the alli­ance, which remains the "fundamental bedrock" for the United States — краеугольный камень, устои.

Mr Romney's campaign at first dismissed the carpers as "bedwet- ters" — мочащийся в кровать.

Despite the violence, democracy in Pakistan may be bedding down — улечься, устроиться на ночь.

But he did nothing publicly to undermine his image as Beelzebub or Mephistopheles — or as the man who, by ringing his little bell, could regularly remind Italians where the real power lay — Вельзевул, глава демонов (одно из имен сатаны в Библии).

My two biggest beefs with the proposed plan: One: Why the hell should employers be on the hook for providing health insurance? — жалоба, недовольство.

This may seem small beer given Britain's target of an 80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 — мелочь.

Biologists have long been befuddled by the causes of ageing — одурманенный, сбитый с толку.

The British political class is befogged — запутывать.

Don't befooled by rising travel numbers — airlines, especially big American ones, remain in deep trouble — одурачивать, надувать.

As Mises and Hayek frequently wrote, one intervention by the state into the market begets another in order to attempt to fix the distortions the first — вызывать, порождать (эффект, результат).

The yoke of colonisation that has beggared them for a century or more — разорять; доводить до нищеты.

Beguiled by a pro-Kremlin broadcast media, ordinary Russians have been willing to trade material comfort for national pride — отвлекать внимание.

China, North Korea's closest ally and begrudging patron, has, at the urging of Pyongyang, ratified the ascension in its official condo­lences — ворчать; выражать недовольство.

Too many non-European commentaries follow a beguilingly sim­ple logical path — заманчивый, привлекательный.

The country has actually suffered more because of these two 'begums' than all other natural disasters combined since the Inde­pendence — бегума (замужняя женщина знатного происхождения в Индии).

Many of these killings were investigated by courts on the behest of victims' families — повеление, распоряжение, приказ.

But whatever the reason, it behoves those unwilling to wait for websites to get their acts together — надлежать, следовать.

As for the bejeweled wives, there should legal recourse to es­tablish the cost of their jewelry and that it was legitimately acquired —

в украшениях.

The order of the belaboured transition has been reshuffled, with the presidential poll coming first, then a constitution, then a parliament — лупить, колошматить.

A series of choreographed horrors belies an overall drop in kill­ings — давать неверное представление, искажать.

The same show also has advice for Kim Jong Un, North Korea's bellicose young despot — воинствующий; враждебный.

"Get out! Get out!" bellowed the vast throng in Tahrir — орать; вопить.

When commercial radio took off, musicians bellyached that it would destroy them — хныкать, скулить.

The global economy is sicker than a man with a bellyful of bad oysters — пресыщенный, переполненный.

A former Republican governor of Utah whose 2012 presidential am­bitions were undone by wonkishness and a general lack of belly-fire — комбинация из танца живота и трюков с огнем.

To discuss Thailand's future without considering its monarchy is it­self to belittle an important national institution — занижать, принижать.

Millions of housewives joined in, clanging their pans in solidarity and belying government claims that the protests had been pre-planned rather than spontaneous — изобличать, разоблачать.

This year's revolt against the bemedalled despot will reduce Fin- meccanica's revenue by some Ђ300m — увешанный медалями.

The Financial Times recently bemoaned the green movement's failure to offer accommodation relevant to business travellers — стенать, горевать.

To his bemusement, workers at one of the nationalised compa­nies, a co-operative in Cochabamba, staged a protest sit-in — ошеломлять; потрясать, смущать.

When Boris Johnson was elected as mayor of London in 2008, he promised to rid the city of "bendy" buses — гибкий.

The outlook appears so tediously benign it verges upon the pan- glossian — добрый, милостивый.

In the supposedly benighted music business, a lot of things are making money — разочаровывающий, неразвитый.

Small groups of artisanal fishermen, registered as co-operatives, had exclusive rights to harvest loco and other benthic creatures in a de­fined area of seabed — бентосный, обитающий на дне.

Mostly what I saw were benumbed shoppers standing for a half-hour at the register to pay for their 54" flat panel TV — онемелый; затекший (о руке, ноге).

Most of the Met's Picassos came as bequests or gifts — акт заве­щания, наследство.

But the credit binge has bequeathed serial inflation problems, the collapse of Vinashin, a state-owned shipbuilder, and overextended banks — завещать.

Last year berserk bargain-hunters in the suburbs of New York City trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death — берсеркер (древне скандинавские витязи, отличавшиеся невероятной яростью в бою).

And the torrent of bloodshed in which they were bereaved has never been officially acknowledged — лишать, отнимать, отбирать.

Gordon Brown is simultaneously at the peak of his power and be­reft of it — лишенный, утративший.

He stood still and watched as hundreds of Republicans — berib- boned and besigned — streamed by him on the club level — украшенный лентами.

Louisiana officials want to start building sand berms as barrier islands — уступ; обочина.

The dispute over inventorship has caused some, though not all, potentially interested companies to give the technology a wide berth — причал; место у причала.

Margaret Thatcher, their leader, campaigned in a hideous sweater bespangled with European flags and railed against "the parochial poli­tics of 'minding our own business' " — осыпать блестками.

Beset by scandal, Najib Razak nevertheless seems safe in his job as Malaysia's prime minister — осаждать.

In recognition of Pennsylvania's potential importance as a swing state — she beseeched Democrats, independents and even "thoughtful Republicans" to rally to her standard — заклинать, молить.

Your attempt to besmirch them and their sacrifice against fascism is obscene — бесчестить; пятнать.

Dickens was sufficiently besotted to banish his wife — влюблен­ный, потерявший голову от любви.

That, in turn, would bespatter shale oil's reputation among inves­tors — порочить, чернить.

In debates the marble-smooth Mr Garcetti bests Ms Greuel, whose bland patter is so repetitive — взять верх над кем-л.

Old firms such as A. T. Kearney and Booz & Company (which con­sidered but abandoned the idea of a merger in 2010) are seen by some potential clients as too small to bestride the globe but too big to be nim­ble — сидеть верхом.

Jordan is the Arab country most susceptible to the two major issues bestirring the Middle East — шевелиться, энергично браться за дело.

The besuited dealmaker hunched over a Blackberry is a common sight in airports around the world — в костюме.

Mrs Clinton triumphed, and became an even scarier bete noire for conservatives — предмет особой ненависти или отвращения.

But woe betide them if they then hung on to the funds all the way through 2012 — горе тому, кто...

Much of this betokens what Atul Hatwal, a Labour commentator, calls the victory of the "Stalinists" — символ, олицетворение.

It is unlikely that your betrothed will scarper on horseback, as Julia Roberts did in "Runaway Bride" — обручить, помолвить.

A line is designed to entice an equal number of bettors on either side — держащие пари.

Google has been castigated by a bevy of privacy regulators for inadvertently collecting data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks — совокупность, группа.

Republicans gleefully bewailed the tax on Christmas, with much

invocation of Grinches and Scrooges — оплакивать; скорбеть.

Its leader, Beppe Grillo, a bewhiskered comedian, thinks the euro has choked Italy's exporters by blocking devaluation — бородатый.

Japan urgently needs to increase its tax base, given the bewilder- ingly high level of public debt — удивительно, парадоксально.

Moldovans are the most bibulous, getting through 18.2 litres each, nearly 2 litres more than the Czechs in second place — любящий выпить, выпивающий.

Leaders bicker as the economy sinks — пререкаться, спорить to bicker about, bicker over — спорить о чем-л.

Insects are not nearly as biddable as dogs or horses — послушный, податливый.

Mr Walker, a governor best known for curbing trade unions in Wisconsin, says that the success of Reagan, a former governor of