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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).