If we use foreign generals advised a Chief Minister then their ambitions will only be military and not political

"If we use foreign generals," advised a Chief Minister, "then their ambitions will only be military and not political." Rokhshan showed the weakness of this argument. In the 13th century Arabs were teaching the art to Spanish and Italians and, until 1911, European historians asserted that paper- making was an eighth-century Arab invention.This Asian world order was not dominated by any one power. Their capitals were thousands of miles away across desert expanses, and with over-stretched supply lines both armies relied on local forces. Indeed, it was the change in allegiance of one such force that historians credit for the Arab victory. The two empires were part of an international trade network that extended from the eastern Mediterranean to the western Pacific. Trade between the great Asian empires and the ensuing movement of peoples resulted in artistic, literary, medical and technological exchanges, along with the diffusion of religious and philosophical ideas. Chinese prisoners from the Talas river battle, for example, were to have a profound effect on core Arab industries Chinese paper-makers were settled in Samarkand.

IN 751 the Chinese and Arab armies met at Talas River in present- day Kazakstan. The hard-fought battle resulted in no territorial gain for the Arab victors, but marked the logistical limits for each empire. Does any other word that ends in -phile mean a perversion? Some might suggest Europhile.. Some parents loathe children; some of the childless - such as Virginia Woolf - are magical with them. Paedophile was Havelock Ellis's 1906 coining. An unremarked aspect of the case is that nobody will now have a machine repaired but, instead, buy a new, faster one for less. Meanwhile, we have the word paedophile, but not one for a love of children - which, from the Greek, is in fact what it should mean, just as an audiophile relishes hi-fi rather than smashes it up.

IF EVERY criminal wants to be caught, then Gary Glitter's forbidding a PC World engineer to open his lap-top files was tantamount to making him click on the mouse forthwith. The US Patent Office approved the patent on 10 August this year, but the NSA originally lodged the application on 15 April 1997. The US Patent office keeps all applications secret until it issues a patent.. Encryption software programs scramble data to prevent eavesdropping. "I'm afraid widespread interception is a fact of life and this is what makes encryption so important," he said. "The problem in the UK is that our government is working with the US to prevent UK citizens defending themselves using encryption," he said, referring to the continuing use of export controls to hamper the widespread availability of encryption products. The NSA's current spy technology may be more advanced than methods described in the patent because the application is more than two years old.