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First Sentences

“I grew up on gangster stories.” Rich Cohen, The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation (2019).

“The headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, occupies an imposing edifice of concrete and green glass on the south bank of the River Thames, in London.” Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth (2026).

“’The English language,’ observed Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘is the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.’” Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeill, The Story of English (1986).

“Some Buddhists might say that to write a biography of Siddhatta Gotoma is a very un-Buddhist thing to do.” Karen Armstrong, Buddha (2001).

“As a child, I had a number of strong religious beliefs but little faith in God.” Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1994).

“It seemed an unlikely choice, this large establishment in the financial district, so I stood outside and checked the address, the name of the restaurant, I wondered if I had made a mistake.” Katie Kitamura, Audition (2025).

“’The Jew is being legislated out of Russia,’ Mark Twain wrote in Harper’s Magazine in 1898.” Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn (2016).

“Old Lanscombe moved totteringly from room to room pulling up the blinds.” Agatha Christie, After the Funeral (1953).

“The economy is the grandest collaborative project in human history.” Alex Mayyasi, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life (2026).

“Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.” Douglas Murray, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (2025).

“Evel Knievel was never a very skilled daredevil, but that was part of his charm.” Jeffrey Toobin, The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.

“Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.” Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism.

“They came for her in late August, on the island of Corsica.” Daniel Silva, The English Girl (2013).

“Just months after being paroled from Massachusetts state prison, where he had recently finished serving a seventeen-year sentence for kidnapping and attempted extortion, Louis Royce, now well into his seventies, walks easily through the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.” Stephen Kurkjian, Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist

Posted on by rjonakait

Silva’s Prescience

I told Lisa the Librarian that I was looking for a “read,” maybe a noir mystery. She said that she preferred spy stories and recommended Daniel Silva, a name I recognized from bestseller lists but whom I had never read. Lisa suggested The English Girl, published in 2013, the first Silva she had read. Early on I was not only hooked by the book but also struck by the author’s seeming prescience.

Shamron, a high-level Israeli security agent, is trying to recruit Gabriel, Israeli art restorer, assassin, and spy, for a mission. Shamron states that the American president “says that he will not allow the Iranians to build nuclear weapons. But that declaration is meaningless if the Iranians have the capability to build them in a short period of time.”

Gabriel indicates that this would apply to Japan, but Shamron rejoins, “The Japanese are not ruled by apocalyptic Shia mullahs. If the American president isn’t careful, his two most important foreign policy achievements will be a nuclear Iran and the restoration of the Islamic caliphate.”

Silva’s prescience, however, was limited. He did not foresee that in 2015, two years after the book’s publication, Iran would agree with the United States, England, France, China, Russia, and Germany to limit its uranium enrichment to levels far below that needed for nuclear weapons. That agreement had a major limitation: It expired in 2030, but presumably as that deadline came, there would have been further negotiations to extend the accord. On the other hand, the agreement had two major positives: Iran agreed to ship its more highly enriched uranium out of the country, and, because the agreement also allowed for the international inspection of Iranian facilities, atomic energy inspectors were granted widespread access. All the countries and the inspectors indicated that the agreement was working. Silva had not foreseen that Iran would cede its capability of quickly making a nuclear weapon.

Of course, Silva could not also see that the accord would be an agreement interruptus, when Trump, with his Obama Derangement Syndrome, withdrew from the accord. Trump asserted, without proof and ignoring what the other countries and the inspectors had concluded, that Iran was not living up to the deal.

Not surprisingly, after the U.S. withdrawal, what could easily have been foreseen happened; Iran starting enriching uranium to higher levels than it had before. It was now closer to building nuclear weapons that could be put on missiles than it had in 2013 when The English Girl came out and much higher than before Trump broke the agreement. Silva did not foresee that an American president, Trump, would actually enable Iran to be closer to a bomb than ever before.

Silva’s prescience was limited in another way. Shamron opines that Israel is “foolish to leave our security in [American] hands. [Israeli] generals aren’t sure they can destroy enough of the program to make a military strike effective. And [Israeli intelligence] is telling the prime minister that a unilateral war with the Persians would be a catastrophe of biblical proportions.”

Silva did not foresee that with Trump as president, Israel could easily get America to undertake military actions that Israel wanted done.

Now we are involved in a deadly “excursion” against Iran. Unfortunately, we have seen this movie before. According to Louis Menand in The New Yorker of April 20, 2026, an Assistant Secretary of Defense in March 1965 stated what he saw as U.S. goals in Vietnam: “The principal aim was ‘to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.’ He assigned this a weight of seventy per cent. Second, at twenty per cent, was to keep Southeast Asia out of Chinese hands. And the third, at ten per cent, was to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.” Compare and contrast with Trump’s present goals in Iran, assuming you know what they are.