Word: persia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Flashback. Scion of an Army-officer family, the Shah was born in 1876 in the Firuzkuh district east of Teheran. Iran was Persia then; and in the '80s Russia, which had steadily picked off Persia's northern provinces, conspicuously strengthened her position at Teheran by organizing under Tsarist officers the Persian Cossack Brigade, most effective military force in the country. This rough & tough outfit Reza, a youngster of 24, joined as a trooper...
...bailiwick in the north, the British did beautifully for themselves in the south. Oil had been smelled, and in 1901 for $20,000 bleak-brained Shah Muzaffar-ed-Din gave an English financial adventurer named William Knox D'Arcy a 60-year monopoly to explore and exploit all Persia for petroleum except the five northern provinces in the Russian stakeout...
Britain worried about possible Russian encroachments on India, and there was much talk about the Bear that Walks Like a Man. To lubricate diplomatic friction, in 1907 an agreement was solemnly signed which defined each country's sphere of influence in Persia. Britain was to influence in the southeast; Russia in the north. As for the poor Persians, their attitude was aptly summed up in a Punch cartoon of the period. It showed a Persian cat apprehensively sitting between a lion and a bear. "I will pat its head," says the bear, "and you shall stroke its tail." Pleads...
...months the British have watched with alarm a steady flow of Germans into Iran (TiME, Aug. 11). Some were "specialists" supposed to be working for Iran's new Trans-Iranian Railway, in factories and public works. Some were "archeologists" filled with a wide-eyed interest in ancient Persia. Some wore only the moth-eaten disguise of tourists. According to British calculation, Iran had a tight little nucle us of 3,000 Nazis by the middle of August...
...never gone to Greece. And suppose we had never defended Crete. Where would the Germans be now? Suppose we had simply resigned territory and strategic points to them without a fight, might they not . . . already be masters of Syria and Iraq and preparing themselves for an advance into Persia...