Word: outset
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That would be an easy mistake for this 41-year-old political prodigy, who rose with extraordinary speed from new Member of Parliament in 2001 to the pinnacle of his party just four years later. From the outset, Cameron conducted himself with the confidence of a veteran. Only three days into his job as Conservative leader, he faced then Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of the greatest natural politicians of the age, in the House of Commons. "You were the future once," quipped Cameron, his skin smoother and shinier than Sock Man's. His opponent suddenly looked old and spent...
...Kosovo, arguably, was the hardest case of all. At the outset, I opposed the war, not just because the decision to get involved was taken in the teeth of Russian opposition, but also because NATO was openly taking sides in a civil war (Kosovo was legally part of Serbia). As the scale of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo became clear, I changed my mind, coming to believe that there were rare cases when humanitarian intervention - that sly little euphemism for war - was justified. But nobody can say they weren't warned about what would happen next. In their new book America...
NATO's very purpose had been to contain the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II. The Red Army had just broken the back of Hitler's Wehrmacht and put Moscow in control of the Baltic states (annexed at the outset of the war), Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. Having watched Central Europe transformed by Soviet military power into a patchwork of authoritarian vassal states, Western Europe was only too willing to join an all-for-one military alliance with the U.S. and Canada to even up the odds in the event of further Soviet...
...dark underground caverns of a prestigious New York newspaper are the right setting for the murder at the outset of Black and White and Dead All Over (Knopf; 368 pages) by John Darnton, the author of biology-fiction thrillers Neanderthal and The Darwin Conspiracy. A 30-year veteran of the New York Times, Darnton delivers a knowing, insider's portrait of the newspaper with great sympathy and humor, and successfully captures the intense human drama and daunting business imperatives in the world of newspapering. A sense of impending doom hovers over the enterprise, a sense that its greatness is slipping...
...most Chinese, victory in Beijing will not only prove their country's status as a potential superpower but also erase its historic humiliation by colonial powers. Stupefied by opium, cowed by Western firepower, China was dismissed at the outset of the 20th century as the "sick man of Asia." Indeed, the first article Chairman Mao ever published was on the importance of sporting success to the national psyche. "Our nation is wanting in strength," he fretted back in 1917. "If our bodies are not strong, how can we attain our goals and make ourselves respected?" Winning, Mao and his followers...