5:40 - 2 - March to victory 11:30 - 3 - Chaos era 16:05 - 4 - Spinners & losers 19:05 - 5 - The miracle 23:00 - 6 - Turning points
Deng Xiaoping (22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997), also known by his courtesy name Xixian (希贤), was a Chinese revolutionary leader and politician who served as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from December 1978 to November 1989. After Mao Zedong's death in 1976, Deng gradually rose to supreme power and led China through a series of far-reaching market-economy reforms earning him the reputation as the "Architect of Modern China". This led to China becoming the world's largest economy in terms of its purchasing power in 2014.
Winston Churchill Got a Lot of Things Wrong, But One Big Thing Right: He contemplated using poison gas on German civilians. He wanted to keep England white. And more. But he had the quality Britain needed most at exactly the moment it was needed.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/winston-churchill-got-a-lot-of-things-wrong-but-one-big-thing-right
Throughout the war, Churchill took little interest in government propaganda from a strategic point of view, since he believed that Hitler could be beaten only by armed force, not by words. However, he took an intense interest in how the press was depicting the government and him personally, amounting to an obsession.
Churchill would often phone the Ministry Of Information at midnight and demand that copies of the next day’s newspapers be sent over to Downing Street or Chequers for him to read in bed. He would scour each page for reporting that he considered disloyal and complain bitterly to Minister of Information Brendan Bracken – his former Parliamentary Private Secretary – who would then have to smooth things over with editors.
Churchill shared this dislike of the press with other members of his coalition War Cabinet, including Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. On several occasions Churchill and Morrison threatened full blown government regulation and censorship and on one occasion threatened to close down the Daily Mirror completely.
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Would one like to verbally spar with Churchill? None dared.
Not all his insults were as thought provoking. Some were barbed curmudgeonly execrable retorts such as those directed at Neville Chamberlain. His decency and unwillingness to subject Britain to another world war, led him on the vain path of appeasement. In this approach, Hitler perceived weakness which he exploited.
Instead Churchill through inspired foresight recognised the rise of Nazism as a dire threat. To counter Chamberlain’s endeavours, he maligned Chamberlain mercilessly.
Here is a sample of those barbed sardonic comments: “He looked at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.” On another occasion he noted, of Neville Chamberlain, “At the depths of that dusty soul there is nothing but abject surrender”. Finally Churchill quipped, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”
The "Cliveden Set" tag was coined by Claud Cockburn in his journalism for the Communist newspaper The Week. It has long been widely accepted that this aristocraticGermanophilesocial network was in favour of friendly relations with Nazi Germany and helped create the policy of appeasement. John L. Spivak, writing in 1939, devotes a chapter to the Set. Norman Rose's 2000 account of the group proposes that, when gathered at Cliveden, it functioned more like a think-tank than a cabal. According to Carroll Quigley, the Cliveden Set had been strongly anti-German before and during World War I. After the end of the war, the discovery of the Nazis' Black Book showed that the group's members were all to be arrested as soon as Britain was invaded; Lady Astor remarked, "It is the complete answer to the terrible lie that the so-called 'Cliveden Set' was pro-Fascist."
The actual beliefs and influence of the Cliveden Set are matters of some dispute, and in the late 20th century some historians of the period came to consider the Cliveden Set allegations to be exaggerated. For instance, Christopher Sykes, in a sympathetic 1972 biography of Nancy Astor, argues that the entire story about the Cliveden Set was an ideologically motivated fabrication by Claud Cockburn that came to be generally accepted by a public looking for scapegoats for British pre-war appeasement of Adolf Hitler. There are also academic arguments that while Cockburn's account may have not have been entirely accurate, his main allegations cannot be easily dismissed.
The Coterie was a fashionable and famous set of English aristocrats and intellectuals of the 1910s, widely quoted and profiled in magazines and newspapers of the period. They also called themselves the "Corrupt Coterie".
They were best known for their extravagant parties and were associated with such places as the Café Royal and The Cave of the Golden Calf, London's first nightclub. The group made a common pledge to be "unafraid of words, unshocked by drink, and unashamed of 'decadence' and gambling". The group reveled in drink, blasphemy, gambling, drug-taking, chloroform ("chlorers") sniffing, and other kinds of decadent behaviour. While the group's principal purpose was the pursuit of pleasure, their default attitude was one of cynical heartlessness, that at times was downright cruel.
Many were the children of The Souls, with Lady Diana Manners and Raymond Asquith being seen as the undisputed golden couple of the group.
Reportedly, without the occasionally moderating influence of Raymond Asquith, the behaviour of the group might have been even more unacceptable and out of control, as he was fourteen years older than Lady Diana and well respected by the whole group. In the early years of the group Asquith was the leader, moderating them to take pride in their learning and erudition, while enjoying wild and riotous parties and pranks. For all their wild parties, however, there was still a standard of behaviour to be upheld and all members paid for the damage that they caused.
The members indulged themselves in treasure hunts, fancy dress balls, and poker evenings, while holding riotous parties until dawn with their actions documented by the press. The members were also in high demand by the great hostesses and eminent politicians of the day. Their behavior at one such party was documented by Asquith's stepmother who recorded that, "After dinner, Diana ejaculated, 'I must be unconscious tonight' and went away in a taxi to fetch chloroform from the chemist. 'Jolly old chlorers!' One guest who had nearly fainted at dinner had to be removed before the orgy began."
With the outbreak of war, many members left for the front, causing Asquith to be seen as the pre-war symbol of the Coterie, and Lady Diana Manners, wife of Duff Cooper, to become the post-war symbol for the 'new' Coterie. She became known for throwing wilder parties, with freer sex and drink in an effort to escape the horrors of the war.
During the War, Manners wrote to Edward Horner on 7 August 1914, claiming that she thought it was "...up to the Coterie to stop this war."
WW1 destroyed the original Coterie, taking the lives of Percy "Perf" Wyndham in 1914; Charles Lister, Julian Grenfell, Billy Grenfell, and Yvo Charteris in 1915; Edward Wyndham Tennant, Ego Charteris and Raymond Asquith in 1916; and Edward Horner, and Patrick Shaw-Stewart in 1917. It also destroyed the security of the group's prewar life, and the remnants were slowly breaking around them after the war.
Lady Diana Manners was seen as a "focus for all the interlocking friendships" comforting many who had lost their husbands or siblings in the War. She wrote about aiding Katharine Asquith after the death of Raymond Asquith to Patrick Shaw Stewart; "I tried to sink my misery and think of holding K up as we all must."
Lady Diana Manners later wrote that she was a little ashamed of the name, and did not know how it came to be called the Coterie, just as her mother was ashamed of title of the Souls.
Lady Diana also reported that the group's "...peak of unpopularity was certainly 1914 and 1915." This sentiment was followed by some of their parents, as Raymond Asquith's stepmother wrote to Hilda Harrisson, calling the group "...a rotten social gang...who lead a futile and devastating life." Lady Cynthia Asquith, Raymond Asquith’s sister-in-law, wrote in her diary, "I don't care a damn about their morals and manners, but I do think what - for want of a better word - I call their anti-cant, is really suicidal to happiness."
Two deaths were attributed to the group and their actions, with Gustav Hamel, a Swedish amateur flyer and racing driver crashing his private plane during a flight from France to London, and Denis Anson drowning in the Thames during a late-night swimming party.
Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. By the 1870s, the scientific community and a majority of the educated public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations which gave only a minor role to natural selection, and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.
Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations, and in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay that described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories. Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (1881), he examined earthworms and their effect on soil
