Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Britain could not pursue Germany’s economic policy of autarchy. As exports declined with the switch to war-production (taking 1938 as 100, British exports had fallen to 29 per cent by 1943, imports only to 77 per cent), gold and dollar reserves disappeared. The Roosevelt administration was verbally sympathetic to the Allies but in practice unhelpful. Pitiful French calls for help in early June 1940 were coldly dismissed by Cordell Hull as ‘a series of extraordinary, almost hysterical appeals’. For some time Britain fared no better. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, another Roosevelt campaign contributor, did not even provide verbal support: ‘From the start I told them they could expect zero help. We had none to offer and I know we could not give it and, in the way of any material, we could not spare it.’107 By the end of 1940 Britain had run out of convertible currency: she had only $12 million in her reserves, the lowest ever, and was obliged to suspend dollar
Modern Times
Paul Johnson
Assuming Gordievsky and his family were successfully smuggled across the Russian border, a second phase of the escape plan would begin, because reaching Finland would not mean that Gordievsky was safe. As Ascot observed: “The Finns had an agreement with the Russians to turn over to the KGB any fugitives from the Soviet Union that fell into their hands.” The term “Finlandization” had come to mean any small state cowed into submission by a much more powerful neighbor, retaining theoretical sovereignty but effectively in thrall. Finland was officially neutral in the Cold War, but the Soviet Union retained many of the conditions of control in the country: Finland could not join NATO, or allow Western troops or weapons systems on its territory; anti-Soviet books and films were banned. The Finns deeply resented the term “Finlandization,” but it accurately represented the situation of a country forced to look both ways, keen to be seen as Western but unwilling and unable to alienate the Soviet Union. The Finnish cartoonist Kari Suomalainen once described his country’s uncomfortable position as “the art of bowing to the East without mooning the West.”
The Spy and the Traitor
Ben Macintyre
It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no “around” around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there—whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from. And so, from nothing, our universe begins.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise