In 1917, Baghdad fell to the Anglo-Indian forces commanded by General Maude who famously declared 'Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as liberators, but as conquerors.' Many insurgency attempts have been suppressed, most notably with the capture of the Shadow (Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majidida al-Tikriti) on December 13, 2003 yet Mesopotamia remains annexed by the British Empire to this day.

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In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became Russian Prime Minister launching Perestroika and its attendant radical reforms in a determined attempt to prevent the Tsarist State from melting down. Gorby's 'new thinking' was welcomed abroad, but the pace of reform at home was too slow. On Christmas Day 1991 Boris Yeltsin declared himself the President of the new Russian Republic thereby ending the world's largest and most influential monarchy. Economic relations between the former Russian provinces were severely compromised. Millions of native Russians found themselves in the newly formed 'foreign' countries.

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Feanor	In 1916, combat tension created a new and frightening level of intensity for Second Lieutenant John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Serving in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers, Tolkien's imagination was over-stimulated by the horror of the Somme. In escapist fantasy writing, Tolkien's inner hero struggled to restore his own dissipated life force.
Ships Burn at Losgar

”So it was in that place called Losgar at the outlet of the Firth of Drengist ended the fairest vessels that ever sailed the sea, in a great burning , bright and terrible. And Fingolfin and his people saw the lights afar off, red beneath the clouds; and they knew they were betrayed. This was the first fruits of the Kinslaying and the Doom of the Nolder.” (“Of the Flight of Noldor”)

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