Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

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.