Microsoft Windows

NSA has done somethuing similar with computers. In September 1999, leading European investigative reporter Duncan Campbell revealed that NSA HAD ARRANGED WITH Microsoft to inser special “keys” into Windows software. In all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientists, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonyum in North Carolina, has disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun- Microsoft's developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called “KEY” The other was called “NSKEY” Fernandez presented his finding at a conference ay which some Windows developers were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without user's knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA 's “back door” in the world most commonly operateing system makes it “orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer.”

In February 2000, it was disclosed that the strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According with the DAS report, “it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration. “ The report stated that there had been a strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumours about the existence of spy programmes on Microsoft , and by the ptesence of NSA personnel in Bill Cates development teams” The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft biggest client in the world.

From the book “ROGUE STATE”, by William Blum

1980s, the United States and the Cocaine Import Agency

In naddition to the cases cited above of drug-laden planes landing in the US unmolested by the authorities, there is the striking case os Oscar Danilo Blandón and Juan Norwin Meneses, two Nicaraguans living in California. To support the Contras (particularly during a period in which Congress banned funding them), as well as enriching themselves, the two men turned to smuggling cocaine into the US under CIA protection. This led to the distribution of large quantities of caciane into Los Angeles' inner city at a time when drug users and dealers were trying to make the costly white power more affordable by changing it into little nuggets of “crack.” The Nicaraguans funneled a portion of their drug profits to the Contra cause while helping to fuel a disastrous crack explosion in Los Angeles and other cities, and enabling the gangs to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from Blandón himself.

The ties between the two Nicaraguans and the CIA were visible not far beneath the surface, as the following indicate:

When Blandón was finally arrested in October 1986 (after Congress had resumed funding for the Contras and his services were much less needed), and he admitted to crimes that have sent others away for life, the Justice Deaprtment turned him loose on unsupervised probation after only 28 months behind bars and subsequently paid him more than $166,000 as an informer.

According to a legal mption filed in a 1990 police corruption trial in Los Angels: in a 1986 raid on Blandón' money-launderer, the police carted away numerous documents purportedly linking the US government to cocaine trafficking and money-laundering on behalf of the Contras. CIA personnel appeared at the sheriff' department within 48 hours of the raid and removed the seized files from the evidence room. At the request of the Justice Department, a federal judge issued a gag order barring any discussion of the matter.

When Blandón testified in 1996 as a prosecution witness in a drug trial, the federal prosecutors obtained a court order preventing defense lawyers from delving into his ties to the CIA.

Though Meneses was listed in the DEA's computer as a major international drug smuggler and was implicated in 45 federate investigations since 1974, he lived openly and conspicuously in California until 1989 and never spent a day in a US prison. The DEA, US customs, the Los Angeles Country Sheriff's Department and the California Bureau fo Narcotic Enforcement all complained that a number of the probes of Meneses were stymied by tha CIA or unnamed “national security” interests.

Lastly the Cia-Contra-Drugs nexus brings us the case of the US attorney in San Francisco who gave back $36,800 to an arrested Nicaraguan drug dealer, which had been found in his possession. The money was returned after two Contra leaders sent letters to the courts swearing that the drug dealer had been given the cash to buy supplies “ for the reinstatement of democracy in Nicaragua.” The letters were hurriedly sealed after prosecutors invoked the Classified Information Procedures Act, a law designed to keep national secrets from leaking out during trials. When a US Senate subcommittee later inquired of the Justice Department the reason for this unusual turn of events, they run into a wall of secrecy. “The Justice Department flipped out to prevent us from getting access to people, records – finding anything out about it, 2recalled Jack Blum, former chief counsel to the Kerry Senate subcommittee referred to above, which investigated allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking. “It was one of the most frustrating exercises that I can ever recall.”

Then more I Think about it, it's the diference between manslaughet and murder. It's the intent. The intent was not to poison black America but to raise money for the Contras, and they [the CIA] didn't care what it came from. If it involved selling drugs in black communities, well, this was the price of admission Gary Webb

From the book “ROGUE STATE”, by William Blum

The CIA and Drugs: Just Say “Why Not?”

In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigation almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA

Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit

1947 to 1951, France

Corsican and Mafia criminal syndicates in Marseilles, Sicily and Corsica – benefiting from CIA arms, money and psychological warfare- suppressed strikes and wrestled control of labor unionsfrom the Communist Party. In return , the CIA smoothed the way for the gansters tobe left unmolested, and unindicted, and to restablish the heroin racket that had been restrained during the war – the famous “French Connection” that was to dominate the drug trade for more than two decades and was responsible for most of the heroin entering the United States.

From the book “ROGUE STATE”, by William Blum

US Army, "Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla"

US Army, "Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla"
"Measures of controlling the Population and Resources:
 1. ID Cards. An effective system of identification is fundamental to the program.
 2. Registration. A program of registering families is used to supplement the system of ID cards, This is the system of inventorying all families by house, making a list of all members who live in the house along with the family's resources. One can also note the presence of insurgent tendencies and affiliations among the population.
 3. Control by block. The purpose of block-by-block control is to detect the individuals who are supporting or sympathising with the insurgents and the type of support they are providing.
 4. Police patrols. Their purpose is to detect sources of insurgent support, sympathizers, and routes used by the insurgent forces for intelligence, logistics, and routine activities.
 Curfew . The purpose is to permit the authorities to identify violators and take actions based on the premise that anyone who violates the curfew is an insurgent or sympathizes with the insurgents until he can prove the contrary.
 Checkpoints. It is of little use to establish a programme of passes and ID cards unless there is a system of verifying these official papers. Therefore, establishing checkpoints in all travel routes is necessary in all travel routes isx necessary once the use of passes has started."

From the book "Rogue State" by William Blum

'Who was her father?

    'Who was her father? Only a man on the railway and the mother takes lodgers. Why are we beholden to her ?' Mother said. For many years the lady was known to us only as 'Miss H'.
 There was my father sitting in that office with 'that woman' all the week; Mother said: why didn't he stay with her if she was so wonderful. We know she put the money. How did she get it? Cheese paring. My mother was not going to cheapen herself by visiting them. She might not be educated but she knew the difference between sixpence and a shilling and had been brought up straight. We were shocked. Mother was jealous. There were two women; Mrs Eddy and this lady, Miss H.
 And why had we got to be so polite to her?  The Business. Our father had ceased to be our father. He now became 'the Business'. It was a shadow in our fire proof room.
 And then this woman, Miss H, was a woman and women are woman-like, Mother said. Not that she had any doubts about Father, for she knew he was true, but if women don't get one thing they go for another. They don't let go.
 As for Father being true, this is as certain as anything can be. He really hated women. He despised them. They existed to be his servants, for his mother - as my mother said - had waited on him hand and foot. Of course he charmed women; they liked talking to him, he appealed to their masochism. If they fought back or showed any signs of taking charge of him, his face went cold. His favourite gesture was to hold up his hand, palm upwards and wag it insultingly up and down, silently telling them to shut up. Their role was to listen to him and he had a lot to say. But once let them discuss, differ or suggest another idea and the hand went up , playfully at first but, if they persisted, he was blunt with them . He described these incidents to us often. His phrase was 'I put her in her place'. It was unlucky also that in his trade most of the workers were women. It must be said that several of these, who admired his vitality, loved him all their lives. perhaps Miss H the bookkeeper did; Mother scornfully thought so.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

Father's elevation and dignity had a silence effect, on our home

Father's elevation and dignity had a silence effect, on our home. The words; Managing Director, put him in a trance. He told us  that we had now many privileges; first we were the children of a Managing Director, living in a refined neighbourhood among neighbours who would study our manners. We has also the privilege of living within a hundred yards of a remarkable family and an even more remarkable woman, the secretary to the Company whose brother, high in financial circles, played tennis at a most exclusive club. My father doubted if this family  would feel able to know us immediately, but if by some generous condescension they did, we would remember to have our hands and shoes clean, brush our hair, raise our caps and never sit down until told to do so. Father's face had lost its roundness. It had become square, naked and authoritative. It also looked pained; as if he were feeling a strange imposed constraint.
Mother supported him vogorously; in fact, as we soon  saw, with unnatural vigour. It was irony on her part. Our debt to this family and to this lady was total, she said. The lady appeared almost before Father finished speaking, which took my father and my mother aback, my mother's hair (as usual) being not quite in a state for receiving another woman. And we were taken aback too.  We have expected perhaps another operatic Mrs Murdo in red velvet; instead a tall, beautiful young womanwith burning brown eyes, and black hair, came in. Her eyeslashes fluttered. She had alluring lips and, on the upper lip, a few black hairs at the corner which, before the fashion changed, made women sensually disturbing. . Her voice was a shade mannish, low and practical, she was slender and wore a business-like coat and skirt with a white blouse. She struck us as elegant, even fashionable. To our delight she teasingly addressed our father as "Father" which made him blush. She even called him "Sawdon"; it was as she had called him Lord.She put so much at our ease,that we loved her at once and got boisterous, my father deterred to her and so did my mother who also blushed.
One of her first questions to me was: when I was going to sit for a scholarship to the college ? This was startling to me and I looked for help to my father.
?When he is ready,' said my father.?I do not want him to imagine that just because his father has his own business ha has only to sit about waiting for everything to fall into his lap.'
'Which school are you going to send him to?' she turned to my mother.
'I really don't know,' said my mother.
'We are considering the matter,' said my father in his boardroom manner.'It maybe this or that. It may be the College, though we shouldn't limit ourselves to that. There may be other, better schools,than the College.'
 My father evasions stopped. Certainly appeared and a look of polite but firm rebuke came to his face. He liked the gaiety of the lady but he was not going to allow her to  lead the way in his family or anywhere else. The matter was raised to a graver, higher and crushing tribune.
'He will go where the Divine Mind wishes him to go, for he is a reflection of the Divine Mind.'
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

A reaction against this fierce system had set in at the turn of the century

A reaction against this fierce system had set in at the turn of the century. Socialism and the scientific revolution - which Wells has described - had moved many people. New private schools for the well-off were beginning to break with the traditions of the nineteenth century and a little of the happy influence seeped down to ourselves.Mr Bartlet represented it. The Education Officer had instructed Mr. Timms to give Mr. Barlett a free hand for a year or so and to introduce something like the Dalton r tutorial systam in our class. The other teachers hated him and it; we either make some much noise that the rest of the school could hardly get on  with their work, or were silent that teachers would look over the frosted glass of the door to see if we had gone off for a holiday.
Mr Barlet was a stumpy, heavy-shouldered young man with a broad swarthy face, large brown eyes and a lock of black hair wagging romantically over his forehead. He looked like a boxer, lazy in his movements and his right arm hung back as he walked to the blackboard as though he was going to swing a blow at it. He wore a loose tweed jacket  with baggy pockets in which he stuck books, chalks and pencils and, by some magnetism he could silence a class almost without a word. He never used the cane. Since we could make as much noise as we liked, ge got easily silence when he wanted it. Manners scarcely existed among us as a scraping and snivelling; he introduced us to refinements we had never heard of and his one punishment took the form of an additional and excruciating lesson in this subject. He would make us write a formal letter of apology. We would make a dozen attemps before he was satisfied. And,  when, at last . we thought it was done he would point out that still was incomplete. It must be put in an envelope, properly addressed: not to Mr. Bartlett,  not to Mr. W.W. Bartlett, not as I did to Mr W.W.Barlet Esquire, but to the esquire without the mister. It often took us a whole day and giving up all the pleasants lessons the rests were doing, to work out the phrasing of these letters of shame.
At Rosendale Road I said good-bye to Stepehn and Matilda and the capes and rivers of England, the dreary sing-song. We were no longer foredoomed servants but foundour freedom. Mr. Bartlett's methods were spacious. A history lesson may go on for days. if it was about early Britain an old downland encampments he would bring us wild flowers from the Whiltshire tumulti. He set up his easel and his Whatman boards and painted pictures to illustrate his lesson. Sometimes he changed to pastels. And we could go out and watch him and talk about what he was doing . He made us illustrate our work and we were soon turning "Bustlett's by de dozen. He set us tasks in threes or fours, we were allowed to talk to each other, to wander about for consultations: we acted short scenes from books at a sudden order. For myself the lessons on literature and specially poetry were the revelation. No text books. our firsts lessons were from Ford Madox Ford's English Review which was publishing some of the best young writers of the time. We discussed  Bridges and Massefield. Chidren who seemed stupid were suddenly able to detect a fine image line and disentangle it from the ordinary.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

At the age of seventeen

At the age of seventeen, three years later than her sisters, my mother  was sent as an apprentice to work in this large draper's shop. At Daniels mother was put into the millinery and there father saw her. He saw her fair hair. She looked - he told me - like a goddess in her mutton-chop sleeves and so desireble with her tiny waist. ('Eighteen inches', she would put in). She was so quick with the costumers, he said, so clever with trimmings! She could put an ugly hat on a grumbling woman, give a twist, snatch a feather or a bunch of cherries and so dazzle the customer with chatter and her smiles.
 As for my father, Mother was astonished by him.
 'He was so clean, dear. You never saw anything so clean.' The poorly paid assistant fed in the basement, slept in the attics and went out to get drunk when the shop closed.
'Eight to eight, weekdays, eleven o'clock Saturday nights'
Mother would say. 'Old Daniels was a beast'
They worked in the cold draughts  and the poisonous headaching smell of the gaslight.
'So clean' my mother would go on 'and so particular about his clothes - you know your father. Always the silk hat and the spats. He might have got some bad girl if he hadn't had me.'
 She was in awe of him; he kept his nails perfect and there was a pleasant smell of Pear's soap about him and his teeth were white. He cleaned them - as his mother did- with soot or salt.
 At this period my father - who was eventually to become very fat indeed, going up to eighteen stone in his time - was a slender young man. He looked grave, his fine brown eyes seemed to burn, and he could change from the effusive to the canny hard look of the brisk young Yorkshireman out for the 'brass' there was sometimes a hollow-eyed and haunted look on his face. The fact is what he told me my dumbstruck mother when they talked together - he had had a wretched childhood. My grandfather, so benevolent to me , had been a harsh, indeed a savage, father.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

It was easy to become a preacher in those days

It was easy to become a preacher in those days; gospel halls and missions were everywhere; the greater the number of sects, the greater the opportunities for argument, Soon he was at it in the evenings, after he had put down the hod. Yet to have got religion would not have been enough. I think that what impelled and gave him a rough distinction was his commanding manner and the knowledge that he had a fine voice. He was a good singer, he loved the precise utterance of words. He loved language. All we ever knew was that a pious spinster lady in Kirbymoorside, heard of him and was impressed by his militant looks,his strenght and his voice. She got him off the builder's ladder and arranged hor him to be sent to a theological college in Nottingham.
But the flesh - and ambition- were as strong as the spirit in grandfather. He was courting the tailor's daughter and perhaps as a commomn workman he would not have get her. So at nineteen or twenty, on his prospects, he married her and went off with her to Nottingham as a student, and in a year was a father. He had only a small grant to live on. He got odd jobs. He told me he learned his Latin , Greek and Hebrew travelling on the Nottingham trams. He saved pennies, for it was part of the arrangement that he should pay back the cost of his education at so much a year in five years. My father had unhappy memories of a hungry chilhood, and one of great severity. But once his training was over grandfather triumphed. At twenty-two - the family legend is - he 'filled the Free Trade Hall i Manchester' with his harsh, denouncing sermons.
 Why was it , then, that after his success he was to be found in Bradford and then - getting smaller and smaller - in the little towns of the moos and the fells? It may have been that all his energy had been spent in getting out the working class and becoming a middle-class man.

Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

My grandmother has always lived in small Yorkshire towns or villages

My grandmother  has always lived in small Yorkshire towns or villages. Her maiden name was Sawdon and she came from a place of that name near the moors inland from Whitby; it is a purely Scandinavian part of England - and she was the youngest, prettiest and most exacting of three daughters of a tailor in Kirbymoorside, in the godly Pickering valley near by. My fatherwas born there and spoke of seeing the old man sitting crosslegged and sewing on the table on the window of his shop. Grandma was vain of her clothes and her figure. She usually wore a dark blue-and-white spotted dress. She had pale blue eyes deeply insent, a babyish and avid look,  and the drooping little mouth of a spoiled child. Her passion for her husband and her two sons was absolute; she thought of nothing else and me she pampered. With outsiders she was permanent 'right vexed' or 'disgusted'
Her 'Willyum', my grandfather, was let out of her sight as little as possible. The minister had the hard northern vanity also, but differed from hers. He was a shortish, stout, hard-bellied, and muscular man with a strong frightening face, iron-grey hair and looked like a sergeant major who did not drink. He was a man of authority with a deep, sarcastic voice used to command. When I was a child I had the impression that e was God and the Ten Commandments bound together by his dog-collar. He was proud of his life story..
 Gradually I learned that he was the youngest son of a fishing family in Hull _ his father was a trawler seaman - and that all his brothers had been drowned between Hul and Dogger Bank. His mother had picked him up and taken him inland to Bradford , away from ships, and had brought him up there in great poverty. He had known what it was to 'clem'. He grew up and worked  on the roads for a time; the ran off and joined the army, (this would had been in the sixties) and since only the hungry or the riff raff did this, he must been in a poor way. he chose the artillery. This lead to an event of which he boasted.
One day when his battery was stationed outside some seaside place, I believe on the Mersey. They were at artillery target practice, firing out to sea, and the safety of passing vessels was regulated by a flag signal. It is quite in my grandfather's character that he fired his gun when the flag was up and contrary to orders and sent what he used to tell me was a 'cannon ball' through the mainsail of a passng pleasure yacht. The yacht, of course, belonged to a rich man who made a fuss and my grandfather was arrested and court-martialled. He was dismissed from the Army
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

In these sudden crisis of our lives

In these sudden crisis of our lives when I went off with my father to Yorkshire, my mother sometimes took mu brother Cyril to her sister's at Ipswich ans left him there. When the two of us met again we would be astonished to see how long our legs had got and scarcely recognized each other's voices. Nine had the hard Yorkshire strain, he had the softer, politer voice of the south. Unlike myself ha was an affectionate boy and he observed more of the true situation in our home than I did. He was an easy victim and he early became a very bad stammerer. this vanished at our Aunt's house where he was the little gentleman, used to the drawing room, to servants and Edwardian niceties. When he came back to our rough and tumble, the sight of a table no properly laid and of rooms ill-furnished and knocked about by our life, made him nervous and upset. He taked in careful and elderly way at the time
 But now we were both leaving York for Ipswich in our own. The train ran through the empty landscape of the Fens lying under the wide skies that had moved the Norwich painters.We saw powerful Ely cathedral on its hill in that flat land and were in sweetly rolling East Anglia, the country of large village churches, monastic building and pretty white pargeted and timbered houses, some of the loveliest things in England. This region had once been rich when England's great wealth was in wool and before the water power and steam engine of the north had captured the trade a century before. Strange names like Eye and March excited me. I had read Hereward the Wake and knew of fanes and that 'silly Sufolk?meant holy Suffolk.
 I saw the reason for my brother's distinction when we got out at Ipswich station. We were met by a tall man of fifty who had a domed head like a large pink egg, fluffy white hair and a short white beard. He looked like a pious ram. Perhaps those mild blue eyes and red wet lips were rougish - as my mother often blurted out in cheery way -burt he had a slow considerate manner and the voice had the straying educated bleat.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

Our journey to the Manse at Repton is miserable

Our journey to the Manse at Repton is miserable. Love in a little shop have been - and remained for life - my mother's ideal. Now, though a cheeky Cokney girl, she was wretched, frightened and ashamed. (' We never owed a penny; up the girls were brought up straight') Sha was a slight and tiny fair-haierd young woman with a sulky seductive look. In the train a salior pi
ulled oof ajack knife and tossed it about: she called the guard. The sailor said he was only doing it to stop the baby crying. The arrival at the Manse was awful. My grandmother was confirmed on her opinion- she had given it bluntly and within earshot, when my father had first taken my mother there, wearing her London clothes -that her favourite son had been trapped and ruined by a common shop-girl of whom she said:
'I lay she's nowt but a London harlot'
She said she'd take the baby.
'She tried to snatch you away from me, Vic dear, and said, she'd bring you up herself,' my mother often told me.
Mary Helen, my father's mother, was a great one for coveting a dress, a brooch, a ring, a bag even a baby from any woman.
As for choice of words - this bonnie little white-haired woman with a smile that glistered sweetly like the icing of one of her fancy cakes, fed her mind on love stories in the religious weeklies and the language of fornication, adultery, harlotry and concubinage taken from the Bible, sharpened by the blunt talk of the Yorkshire villages. Harlots was her general name for the women of her husband's congregations who bought new hats. The old lady assumed that my mother, like any other country girl, had come to leave me and would return next day to London to take up her profession again.
In the early years of my boyhood I spent long periods at the Manse. I have little memory of Repton,beyond the large stone pantry smelling of my grandmother's bread and the pans of milk; and of the grating over the cellarwhere my grand father used to growl up at me from the damp, saying in his enormous and enjoyable voice:
'I'm the grisly bear'
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

On my birth certificate my father's trade is written 'Stationary (master)'

On my birth certificate my father's trade is written 'Stationary (master)'. An ambitious young man, he had given up his job as a shop assistant in Kentish town and had opened a small newsagents and stationery in the Rushmere district of Ipswich. He did not know the city and had gone there because he thought he had a superb 'opening'. He did not know the trade but he had found 'premises'- a word that was sacramental to him all his life. He spoke of 'premises' as others speak of the New Jerusalem. He had no capital. He was only twenty-two; the venture was modest, almost pastoral; but he had smelled the Edwardian boom ant it enlarged a flaw that had - I've been told- even then become noticeable  in this character. one of nature's salesmen, he was more one of nature's buyer. He looked at the measly little shop, stripped it and put in counters, cabinets and shelves('You know your father, dear'). The suspicious Suffolk folk hated this modern splash and saw he had spent so much on fittings that he had nothing left to stock. the bright little shop stood out as a warning to all in a crafty neighbourhood. Few customers came. The new painting smelled of sin to them. At the age of twenty-two my young father was affronted and flabbergasted to find after a few months that he was bankrupt, or if not legally bankrupt, penniless and pursued.
 There a picture of him a year or two before this time. he is thin, jaunty, with thick oily black hair, a waxed moustache and eyes caught between a harsh, brash stare and a twinkle. He would be quick to take apencil out and snap down your order. He wears a watch and chain. not for long: he will soon pawn them - as he had done before -and my mother's engagement ring too, escape from the premises, put her into those rooms over the toy shop. once I was born, the young Micawber pack us to his father's Manse in Yorkshire, while he goes indignantlyback to London to get a 'berth'. The fact that he has gonebust means nothing to him at all. He goes to the nearest Wesleyian Church - for he had already left the Congrecionalist - and sings his debts away in a few stentorian hymns. And so I, dressed in silk finery and wrapped in a white shawl, go screaming up to Yorkshire to meet my forbears.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

In our family, as far as are concerned

In our family, as far as are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth. Go back two generations and the names and lives of our forbears vanish into the common grass. All we could get out of mother was that her grandfather vanish into the common grass. All we could get out of mother was that her grandfather had once taken a horse to Dublin; and sometimes in my father's expansive stories, his grandfather had owned trawlers in Hull, but when an abashed regard for fact, uncommon in my father, touched him in the eighties, he told us that his ancestor, a decayed seaman, was last seen gutting herrings at a bench in the fishmarket of that city. The only certainty is that I come from a set of storytellers and moralists and that neither party cared much for the precise. The story tellers were for ever changing the tale and the moralist tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light. On my mother's side they were all pagans, and she a rootless London pagan, a fog worshipper, brought up on the folk-lore of the North London streets; on my father's side they were harsh, lonely, God-ridden sea or country men, who had been settled along the Yorkshire coasts or among its moors and fells for hundreds of years. There is enough in the differences between North and South to explain the battles and uncertainties of a lifetime. 'How I got into you lot, I don't know,' my mother used to say on and off all her life, looking at us with fear, as if my father and not herself has given birth yo us, She was there , she conveyed, because she had been captured. It made her unbelieving and sly.

A good many shots must have been fired during the courtship of my parents and many more when I was born in lodgings over a toy shop in the middle of Ipswich at the end of 1900. Why Ipswich? My parents had no connexion with the town. The moment could not have been worse. Queen Victoria was dying and my mother, young and cheerful though she was, identified herself, as the decent London poor do, with all the females of the Royal Family, especially with their pregnancies and funerals. She was a natural Victorian; the past with all its sadness meant more to her than the hopes of the new century.

Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

Lloyd and Werner looked back into the auditorium.

Seeing the women safe, Lloyd and Werner looked back into the auditorium.

Volodya was fighting the big man bravely, but he was in trouble. He kept punching the man face and body, but his blows had little effect, and the man shook his head as if pestered by an insect. The Brownshirt was heavy-footed and slowmoving but he hit Volodya in the chest and then the head, and Volodya staggered . The big man drew back his fist for a massive punch. Lloyd was afraid it could kill Volodya.

Then Walter took a flying leap off the stage and landed on the big man's back. Llyod wanted to cheer. They fell to the floor in a blur of arms and legs, and Volodya was saved for the moment.

The spotty youth who had shoved Werner was now harassing the people trying to leave, hitting their backs and heads with his truncheon. 'You fucking coward!' Lloyd yelled, stepping forward. But Werner was ahead of him. He shoved past Lloyd and grabbed the truncheon, trying to wrestle it away from the youth.

The older man in the steel helmet joined in and hit Werner with a pickaxe handle. Lloid stepped forward and hit the older man with a straight right.The blow landed ,perfectly, next to the man's left eye.

But he was a war veteran and not easily discouraged. He swung around and lashed out at Lloyd with his club. Lloyd dodged the blow easily and hit him twice more. He connected in the same area, around the man eye's, breaking the skin. But the helmet protected the man's head and Lloyd could not land a left hook, his knockout punch. He ducked a swing of the pickaxe handle and hit the man's face again, and the man backed away, blood pouring from cuts around his eyes.
Lloyd looked around. He saw that the Social Democrats were fighting back now, and he got a jolt of savage pleasure. Most of the audience had passed through the doors, leaving mainly young men in the auditorium, and they were coming forward, clambering over the theatre seats to get at the Brownshirts; and there were dozens of them.

Something hard struck his head from behind. It was so painful that he roared . He turned to see a boy of his own age holding a length of timber, raising it to strike again. Lloyd closed with him and hit him hard in the stomach twice, first with his right fist then with his left. The boy gasped for breath and dropped the wood. Lloyd hit him wit an uppercut to the chin and the boy passed out.

Llyod rubbed the back of his head. It hurt like hell but there was no blood.

The skin on his knuckles was raw and bleeding, he saw. He bent down and picked up the length of timber dropped by the boy.

The big man who had started it all was on the floor, groaning and holding his knee as if he had dislocated something. Wilhem Frunze stood over him, hitting him with a wooden shovel again and again, repeating at the top of his voice the words the man ha used to start the riot . 'N ot! Wanted ! In!Germany! Helpless, the big man tried to roll away from the blows, but Frunze went after him, until two more Brownshirts grabbed the man's arms and dragged him away-

Frunze let them go.

Did we beat them? Lloyd thought with growing exultation.
Maybe we did!

Several of the younger men chased their opponents up on to the stage, but they stopped there and contented themselves with shooting insults as the Brownshirts disappeared.

Lloid looked at the others. Volodya had a swollen face and one closed eye. Werner`s jacket was ripped, a big square of cloth dangling. Walter was sitting on a front-rowseat, breathing hard and rubbing his elbow, but he was smiling, sailing it across the rows of empty seats to the back.

Werner, who was only fourteen, was exultant. 'We gave them hell,didn't we?'

Lloyd grinned.'Yes. We certainly did-'

Pg 42 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

Robert resembled Walter

Robert resembled Walter, but was more fussily dressed, with a gold pin in his tie, seals on his watch chain, and heavily slicked hair. Jörg was younger, a blond man with delicate features and a cheerful smile. The two had been prisoners of war together in Russia, Now they lived in an apartment over the restaurant.

They reminisced about the wedding of Walter and Maud, held in great secrecy on the eve of the war. There had not been guests, but Robert and Ethel had been best man and bridesmaid. Ethel said: “We had champagne at the hotel, then I tactfully said that Robert and I would leave, and Walter - “ She suppressed a fit of giggles - “Walter said: “Oh, I assumed we would all have dinner together.”

Maud chuckled. “You can imagine how pleased I was about that!”

Lloyd looked into his coffee, feeling embarrassed. He was eighteen and a virgin, and honeymoon jokes made him uncomfortable.

More sombrely, Ethel asked Maud : “Do you ever hear from Fritz these days?”

Lloyd knew that the secret wedding had caused a terrible rift between Maud and her brother, Earl Fitzherbert. Fitz had disowned her because she had not gone to him, as head of the family, and asked his permission to marry.

Pg 26 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

Lloyd Williams found a boxing club in Berlin

Lloyd Williams found a boxing club in Berlin where he could do an hour's training for a few pennies. It was in a working class district called Wedding, north of the city center. He exercised with the Indian clubs and the medicine ball, skipped rope, hit the punch bag, and then put on a helmet and did five rounds in the ring. The club coach found him a sparring partner, a German his own age and size – Lloyd was a welterweight. The German boy had a nice fast jab that came from nowhere and hurt Lloyd several times, until Lloyd hit him with a left hook and knocked him down.

Lloyd had been raised in a rough neighborhood, the East End of London. At the age of twelve he had been bullied at school. 'Same thing happened to me,' his stepfather, Bernie Leckwith , had said. 'Cleverest boy in school, and you get picked on by the class shlamer.' Dad was Jewish – his mother had spoken only Yiddish. He had taken Lloyd to the Aldgate Boxing Club. Ethel had been against it, but Bernie had overruled her, something that did no t happen often.

Lloyd had learned to move fast and punch hard, and the bullying had stopped. He had also got the broken nose that made him look less of a pretty boy. And he had discovered a talent. He had quick reflexes and a combative streak, and he had won prizes in the ring. The coach was disappointed that he wanted to go to Cambridge University instead of turning professional.

He showered and put his suit back on, then went to a workingmen bar, bought a glass of draft beer, and sat down to write to his half-sister, Millie, about the incident with the Brownshirts. Millie was envious of him taking this trip with their mother, and he had promised to send her frequent bulletins.

Lloyd had been shaken by this morning 's fracas. Politics was part of everyday life for him: his mother had been a Member of Parliament, his father was local councilor in London, and he himself was London Chairman of the Labour League of Youth. But it had always been a matter of debating and voting – until today. He had never before seen an office thrashed by uniformed thugs while the police looked on smiling. It was the politics with the gloves off, and it had shocked him.

'Could this happen in London ? He wrote. His first instinct was to think that it could not. But Hitler had admirers among British industrialists and newspapers proprietors. Only a few months ago the rogue MP Sir Osvald Mosley had started the British Union of Fascists. Like the Nazis, they had to strut up and down in military-style uniforms. What next?

He finished his letter and folded it, then caught the S-train back into the city center. He and his mother were going to meet Walter and Maud von Ulrich for dinner. Lloyd had been hearing about Maud all his life. She and his mother were unlikely friends. Ethel had started her working life as a maid in a grand house owned by Maud's family. Later they had been suffragettes together, campaigning for votes for women. During the war they had produced a feminist newspaper. The sodier's wife. Then they had quarreled over political tactics and become estranged.

Pg 23 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

Eleanora Cohen

Eleanora Cohen came into this world on a Thursday, late in the summer of 1877. Those who rose early that morning would recall noticing a flock of purple-and-white hoopoes circling above the harbor, looping and darting about as if in an attempt to mend a tear in the firmament. Whether or nor they were successful, the bird eventually slowed their swoop and settled in around the city, on the steps of the courthouse, the red tile roof of the Constanta Hotel, and the bell tower atop St Basil's Academy. They roosted in the lantern room of the lighthouse, the octagonal stone minaret of the mosque, and the forward deck of a steamer coughing puffs of smoke into an otherwise clear horizon. Hoopoes coated the town like frosting, piped in along the rain gutters of the governor's mansion and slathered on the gilt dome of the Orthodox church. In the trees around Yakob and Leah Cohen's house the flock seemed especially excited, chattering, flapping their wings, and hopping from branch to branch like a crowd of peasants lining the streets of the capital for an imperial parade. The hoopoes would probably have been regarded as an auspicious sign, were it not for the unfortunate events that coincided with Eleanora' birth.

Early this morning, the Third Division of Tsar Alexander II's Royal Cavalry rode in from the north and assembled on a hilltop overlooking the town.

Laid out bellow them like a feast, Constanta had been left almost entirely without defenses

From the book “The Oracle of Stambul” by Michael David Lukas

Do you think journalists should write respectfully about politicians?

Ritter drove on, following the south bank of the Landwehr Canal. Carla looked at the barges, their loads of coal topped with snow like mountains. She felt a sense of disappointment. She had contrived to spend longer with Werner, by hinting that she wanted a lift, then she had wasted the time talking about ice hockey.

What would she have liked to have talked to him about? She did not know.

Herr Franck said to Mother: 'I read your column in The Democrat'.

'I hope you enjoyed it'

'I was sorry to see you writing disrespectfully about our chancellor.'

'Do you think journalists should write respectfully about politicians? Mother replied cheerfully. 'That's radical. The Nazi press would have to be polite about my husband! They wouldn't like that.'

'Not all the politicians, obviously.' Franck said irritably.

They crossed the teeming junction pf Postdammer Platz. Cars and trams vied with horse-drawn carts and pedestrians in a chaotic melee.

 From the book “Winter of the world” by Ken Follet

The meadow was flooded with spring light and dotted with flower-seas

The meadow was flooded with spring light and dotted with flower-seas Alexander ran across it.

Half naked and barefoot, he moved quickly against the wind that blew through his hair and brought with it a slight smell of sea pray.

Peritas was running alongside, checking his pace so as not to overtake his master and lose him. Now and again he barked to attract Alexander's attention and the Prince turned towards the dog and smiled , but without stopping.

It was one of those moments in which Alexander gave free rein to his spirit, in which he flew like a bird, galloped like a steed. It was then that his ambiguous and mysterious centaur- like nature – violent and sensitive, dark and sunny at one at the same time – seemed to find expression in harmonious movement, in a sort of initiatory dance under the shinning light of the sun or in the sudden shade of a cloud.

With which each stride his sculptured body first contracted and then extended in a long movement, his golden hair bounced soft and bright on his back like a mane, and his graceful arms accompanied the rise and fall of his chest in the brisk labour of his running.

Philip watched him in silence, sitting immobile on horseback at the edge of the wood. Then when he realized they were close now and heard the dog's barking suddenly on spotting him, he spurred on his steed and came alongside his son, waving his hand, smiling even, but without stopping him, enchanted as he was by the power of that running and the wonder of those indefatigable limbs.

Alexander stopped on the bank of a small river and dived into the water. Philip dismounted and waited for him. The boy leaped out of the stream together with the dog and they both shook the water from their bodies. Philip embraced his son hard and left Alexander's equally strong grip – tangible proof that his child had become a man.

'I have come to collect you,' he said. 'We're going home.'

Alexander looked at him in disbelief. 'Is that the King's word?'

'The king's word,' assured Philip. 'But the day will come when you will remember this period of your life with regret for its ever having come to and end. I never had such fortune; I had no songs, nor poetry, nor wise lecturers. And this is why I am so tired, son, for this is why my years weigh so heavily on me.'

Alexander said nothing and they walked together through the meadow, towards the house: the young man followed by his dog, the father holding his horse by its bridle.

Suddenly, from behind a hill that hid the view of the Mieza, there came the sound of a horse neighing. It was an acute, penetrating sound, a powerful call like that of a wild beast, or a chemical creature. And then there come the sound of men shouting, calling and powerful hooves all shod with bronze that made the earth tremble.

The neighing came again, more acute and angrier this time. Philip turned towards his son and said, ' I have brought you a present.'

They reached the top of the hill and Alexander stopped in amazement: below, there before him, a black stallion reared up onto his hind legs, shining with sweat like a bronze statue under the rain, held by five men with ropes and bridles in their hands, all trying to keep the animal's formidable power under control.

From the book: Alexander: Child of A Dream. By Valerio Massino Manfredi. Translated by Iain Halliday