The posthumous image of him has been entangled with the real individual, and no one has really fully tried to disentangle them. But achieving that would provide us with a unique window into both the life of the court and fundamental conceptions of humour, humanity, and deviance in the Reneissance. … Fool: In Search of Henry […]
Tag: World History
Sad news: Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Classics and History, prominent for his scholarship, teaching, and social and political commentary, and a longtime colorful figure at Yale, died Aug. 6 in a Washington D.C. retirement home. He was 89. Kagan, who came to Yale in 1969, was a distinguished scholar of Ancient Greek history. […]
Just when I think reality can’t get any weirder, I find out it already did. Thanks (I think) to DangerousMinds.net for their article The Oddly Inappropriate Spec TV Commercial for Never-Produced Caligula Action Figures. I’ve seen a lot of strange things, and I’m happy to say the 1980 movie Caligula directed by Penthouse owner/editor Bob […]
Found at Air Mail, an excerpt/adaptation from The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin, by Douglas Smith, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux today. An engrossing read (no pun intended). The stories began to appear in the Soviet press in the autumn of 1921, each one more […]
Vladimir Bukovsky passed away this past weekend at the age of 76. Before he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976, Bukovsky spent 12 years in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and labor camps. Vladimir Nabokov said of Bukovsky, “Bukovsky’s heroic speech to the court in defense of freedom, and his five years of martyrdom in […]
A grab bag of articles I’ve recently enjoyed: “The Puzzles of Thermopylae” by Chris Carey The story is well known and easily told. But the battle throws up a number of lasting puzzles. We have no contemporary account. Our earliest source, Herodotus, began his research perhaps 30 years or more after the event. He had […]
Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for linking to a review of Ernst Jünger’s recently translated World War II diary A German Officer in Occupied Paris. The article is titled “A Dandy Goes to War”, authored by Michael Lewis. I’ve been interested in Jünger since reading On the Marble Cliffs, probably the strangest book I’ve […]
How to Think about War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy by Thucydides Speeches from The History of the Peloponnesian War Selected, translated, and introduced by Johanna Hanink Princeton University Press, 2019 Hardcover, 336 pages Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers SeriesI had not read any of the releases in Princeton University Press’ Ancient Wisdom “How […]
Several years ago I posted on Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives by Paul R. Gregory. A moving and powerful book, Gregory detailed some of the problems that five Soviet women faced when victimized by the gulag system. I believe I first found out about the book from Cynthia Haven at The […]
Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff Yale University Press, 2019 Hardcover, 424 pagesStalingrad by Vasily Grossman is officially released today. While I’m waiting for my copy to arrive by mail, I wanted to share a little about this outstanding biography. Alexandra Popoff has written several literary biographies and is a former Moscow […]
My oldest expressed interest in seeing The Cold Blue tonight instead of waiting for it on HBO, and who was I to say no? So we’re excited about going tonight for the movie and the extra “making of” short. Plus I’m happy to see the score is provided by Richard Thompson. A good article on […]
In the Books section of each weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal is a list of “five best books” on a particular topic. I’ve found some good leads on books I’d like to read every now and then from this feature. This past weekend edition had a list from Alexandra Popoff, former Moscow journalist and […]
Picture from Old Maps, Expeditions, and Explorations blog The Voynich manuscript has been in the news off and on over the past few years. From Wikipedia: The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), […]
S. N. Jaffe has an article at the War on the Rocks site titled “The Risks and Rewards of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War“ that should be helpful to anyone attempting to read or write about the war. Jaffe is the author of Thucydides on the Outbreak of War: Character and Contest, a study […]
Brutus: The Noble Conspirator by Kathryn TempestYale University Press, 2017 To a considerable extent this book will examine how Brutus’ life has been recorded and transmitted from antiquity to today: a central contention is that, to appreciate Brutus the man, we must really probe the sources we use, to understand who is speaking and shy. […]
Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Ancient Athens by David StuttardHarvard University Press: April 2018Hardcover, 400 pages From the inside book flap: Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled […]
On Grand Strategy by John Lewis GaddisNew York: Penguin Press, 2018 John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military & Naval History at Yale University. He is best known as an author specializing in the Cold War and grand strategy (six of the ten books shown at his faculty page have “Cold […]
A few years ago, the boys and I read Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, a historical fiction book that looks at the “disappearance” of the Roman Ninth Legion (Legio IX Hispana) from Britain in the second century AD. While we enjoyed the book (and the 2011 movie version, The Eagle), we also looked […]
“[G]reat power involves great responsibility.” Sounds like something from Spiderman, but it’s part of a line from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s undelivered Jefferson Day Speech. Coincidentally, Jefferson Day was officially recognized by FDR beginning in 1938. Anyway…the speech can be found at The American Presidency Project. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia the day before this […]
The Avignon Papacy Contested: An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena by Unn Falkeid Harvard University Press, 2017 Series: I Tatti Studies in Itallian Renaissance History The aim of this book has been to explore some of the most significant critics of the Avignon papacy, critics who in many ways came to prepare […]