Today Isis fundamentalists – enemies of secular Arab nationalism – rule in Mosul, and the Kurds – the largest ethnic losers from the 1918 settlements – still make their neighbours nervous of their ambitions for a fully-independent state.
"Haunted", "Nervous", "Jagged" (Eliot); "Eloquent", "Ambition", "Faithless" (Byron); "Fanatic", "Desire", "Comfort" (Yeats).
So some members of the Obama administration are nervous that Mr Abe's ambitions may increase regional tensions.
In his recent memoir, Chirac describes Sarkozy the way nearly everyone in French politics does who has no reason to fear him: "nervous, impetuous, bubbling over with ambition, doubting nothing, least of all himself".
Ms. Broadwell does not say why in the book, although in the interview she said that the White House was nervous about the general's ambitions.
You wait all season for a thrill at Vicarage Road, then along come a procession of them in a seven-try hammering that revives Saracens' title ambitions while shunting nervous Newcastle closer to the relegation morass.
Things like that I learned fast because I had to". It was just that combination of nervous uncertainty and go-for-it ambition that Apatow was looking for in Daisy.
Before the first interview he gave the BBC in 2011, just after he had announced his political ambitions in October, he seemed nervous.
He knows that Google's never-ending ambitions make other people — me included — nervous.
