Word: explainer
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...starters, I'm not. I'm just plain middle class, but I talk as if my family live in a stately home and don't have to work. My ancestors were mainly teachers, vicars, profs and bishops - careers which might require a top-of-the-range voice. That may explain why I speak a distinctly upmarket version of received pronunciation (RP) - shorthand for the standard English of bbc newsreaders. Which is fine if you want to marry a landowner or work in a top art auction house, but not so much fun if you just want to fade into...
...Iranian mining operation in 1987 forced the U.S. to reflag Kuwaiti oil tankers and escort them, in slow-moving files of one and two, up and down the Persian Gulf. A more intense operation would probably send oil prices soaring above $100 per bbl.--which may explain why the Navy wants to be sure its small fleet of minesweepers is ready to go into action at a moment's notice. It is unlikely that Iran would turn off its own oil spigot or halt its exports through pipelines overland, but it could direct its proxies in Iraq and Saudi Arabia...
Those equally unappetizing prospects--war or a new arms race in the Middle East--explain why the White House is kicking up its efforts to resolve the Iran problem before it gets that far. Washington is doing everything it can to make Iran think twice about its ongoing game of stonewall. It is a measure of the Administration's unity on Iran that confrontationalists like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have lately not wandered off the rhetorical reservation. Everyone has been careful--for now--to stick to Rice's diplomatic emphasis. "Nobody is considering a military...
...That might explain an understandable apprehension about similar conversions on a mass scale, if the Ottomans took Constantinople. But if so, it turned out to be unwarranted. When the city finally fell, says Barber, the Muslims eliminated the political structure but kept the church up and running, using the Eastern Orthodox patriarch as spokesman for the Christian peoples within their own empire...
...near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship...