The protests in Homs got going immediately after his second speech.Getting a foothold in that city is a big step for the opposition, which had failed to foment sustained unrest in the heart of Damascus or Aleppo.
"I didn't go to foment revolution," he said.
Apart from the fact that it links to the modern world – one of my favourite touches in fantasy, and the first book in this series to do so – who could fail to love a book that sees a brainwashed Byron attempting to foment unrest amongst "the common labourers"?
Anyone who witnessed the Arab Spring cannot fail to be moved by the use of new communications tools by protestors to foment political change – nor by the desperate attempts by Mubarak's Egypt, Qaddafi's Libya, and others to stop them from doing so.
"And I ask, whose side are they on?" Russia, which has emerged as Syria's main advocate, blamed the United States, NATO and the Arab League on Friday for fomenting the violence inside Syrian by supporting the opposition and denounced the meeting here as foreign interference that would fail to loosen Mr. Assad's grip on power.
Fomenting revolution can be dangerous business, and so absent some other incentive (such as class solidarity), even workers who were convinced that a communist economic order would offer them a superior quality of life might still fail to show up at the barricades.
This attempt to foment old-style class war failed spectacularly, not least because the Labour candidate, Tamsin Dunwoody, was the third generation of Labour establishment politicians.
The Bush administration's response to this challenge - feign diplomacy but tap the war drum and foment regime change in Iran - has obviously failed to change Iran's behaviour, let alone the regime.
"Paradoxically," John Laband writes, "British occupation seemed to be fomenting a sense of national consciousness in the Transvaal which years of fractious independence had failed to elicit".
