Neville describes reading in the New York Times, a year or two before this lecture while he was in New York, that Russia was outraged over a Chinese map that included vast Russian territories as part of China. He compares this to Russia's own 1938 map, which similarly claimed the Baltic states -- Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania -- as Russian territory before the Red Army physically moved in and annexed them in 1940, making the point that no event, however vast, happens in the outer world without first being 'plotted' in imagination.