The World

* In 1837, the poet Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada, countess of Lovelace, and her friend Charles Babbage, partly inspired by the article of an Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea, later premier of united Italy, had devised a programme for what they called an Analytical Engine. In 1843, Lovelace wrote instructions that she called algorithms, inspired by al-Khwarizmi of 820s Baghdad, but she also foresaw the perils of ‘autocrats of information’. Babbage designed their Engine. Yet it was a century before such technology was invented by a German scientist Konrad Zuse who in 1941 built the first computer, Z3, in Berlin and devised the first programming language, Plankalkül. His Z3 was destroyed by an Allied air raid, but after the war Zuse founded the first tech company – and sold his patent to the American company IBM, which had also worked on tabulating vast quantities of personal data for the US government in Nazi Germany and the USA. Simultaneously, at Bletchley Park in Britain, a young mathematician, Alan Turing, who at twenty-four had defined a ‘universal computing machine’, was designing an electromagnetic machine to decrypt the German Enigma code. In 1946, he designed an Automatic Computing Engine and two years later he built one: it filled a room. Next he and a colleague created the first gaming programme, the chess-playing Turochamp. In January 1952, a series of accidents, involving his male lover and a burglary, led to Turing admitting a homosexual relationship, illegal under an 1885 law. Turing pleaded guilty to ‘gross indecency’ and he agreed to an atrocious treatment, chemical castration. At forty-one, Turing killed himself with cyanide.

* After retiring as secretary of state, Rice researched her family history: ‘My great-great-grandmother Zina on my mother’s side bore five children by different slave owners,’ she wrote. ‘My great-grandmother on my father’s side, Julia Head, carried the name of the slave owner and was so favored by him that he taught her to read.’

* The idea of using planes as flying bombs was as old as flying itself, considered by Russian terrorists against the Romanovs in 1905 and used by Japanese kamikazes during the Second World War. Palestinian hijackers had proven both the vulnerability of civilian jet planes and the spectacular fear produced by attacking these hulking symbols of western comfort.

* That was how they killed Rajiv Gandhi. His premiership was overshadowed by an arms scandal, an environmental disaster and his intervention in the civil war between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil Tiger militia in Sri Lanka, initially to protect the Tamils, of whom there were many in southern India. But once in Sri Lanka, Indian troops found themselves fighting fanatical Tamil insurgents, the Tigers. Rajiv lost the 1989 election; and, on 21 May 1991, while campaigning, he was approached by a female Tamil Tiger suicide bomber – the first of a new phenomenon – who ignited her explosives.

* All this blood and treasure delivered one dividend: Qaddafi, fearful that he was next for the Saddam treatment, surrendered his nuclear programme: he was welcomed into the western family. The Americans were outraged to discover that Qaddafi had bought the technology from the Father of the Pakistani Bomb, A. Q. Khan. But the scientist was unchastened: ‘I saved the country for the first time when I made Pakistan a nuclear nation and saved it again when I confessed and took the whole blame on myself.’ Astonishingly the greatest criminal of the nuclear age was never investigated or prosecuted, dying in 2021 of Covid.

* Obama lost his mother early too: in November 1995, aged fifty-two, she died of cancer.

* ‘Russians, Ukrainians and Belorusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus,’ Putin wrote in a historical essay in July 2021. ‘Russians and Ukrainians are one people: a single whole,’ while ‘Modern Ukraine was entirely a product of the Soviet era … on the lands of historical Russia … One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed … The true sovereignty of Ukraine is only possible in partnership with Russia.’ Putin and his new imperialists focused on the Muscovite and Russian conquests that suited him – and ignored the cosmopolitan multi-ethnic Ukraine, ruled by Ottomans, Habsburgs, Polish kings and Lithuanian dukes, and peopled by Cossacks, Tatars, Poles, Jews, Italians and Greeks, as well as Russians and Ukrainians.

* Putin was now premier, having served two presidential terms, the limit allowed by Yeltsin’s constitution. He had pulled off a political chess move – rokirovka – in which a player switches king and castle, choosing a bland henchman to serve as president.