Underbelly

David Gilmour is the author of one of my favorite short biographies (of Giuseppe di Lampadusa, author of  The  Leopard ) and of several oth...

Responding to that Ukraine post , Brad asks: Where did the Union Republics of the USSR come from? The Czar's empire was not organize...

I've been spending some time with John G. Turner's absorbing biography of Brigham Young and I find my mind seeking him to fit him i...

It's conventional for accounts like this to provoke analogies (real or imagined) to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire .  But I...

Vagrant recollections after seeing Captain Phillips , which might win yet another Academy Award for Tom Hanks, should win for  Barkhad Abd...

Plunder: Except a body of about four thousand cavalry, well armed, and fit to make a steady impression in battle, the rest of the army w...

Like his great predecessor Shakespeare, David Hume understood the calamity that is bad government.  Here he sums up the career of Henry III...

Writing yesterday about Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, I remarked on the generosity of his understanding: his capacity to see merit in adve...

Now that I have stupefied the faithful out of their skull with my persistent citations to David Hume, allow me to recall another voice ...

Still keeping company with Hume.  I went to Hume as a followup to what I've been reading about Scandinavia--not, I recognize, to get th...

William of Normandy, not yet William the Conqueror, sees that he may be able to exploit the weakness and disorder of his adversaries to mak...

Hardicanute, Canute the Hardy, succeeded his father, Canute the Great, as  king of Denmark in 1035.  He felt he also had claim to the thron...

Here's a new one on me.  In his remarkable introduction to Beowulf , R. W. Chambers discusses the case of Hrethric and Hrothulf, Scand...

You gotta be alert to catch the good stuff here.   The monks, who were the only annalists during those ages, lived remote from public aff...

Thanks to the good folks at Project Gutenber g and LibriVox , I've been refreshing my memory* on one of the shrewdest, if necessarily n...

Karl Marx lived out most of his  adult life in blameless bourgeois respectability in London where, inter alia , he was once elected Constab...

I've been reading a bit lately on the post-Civil War settlement and in particular, the question of how to redeploy the former slaves, n...

Note to self: quit reading all those hot-off-the-press must reads.  A few of them are good and original: a lot of them just recycle stuff y...

I must have read this before, it ' s my underlining.  But it comes a s a revelation : The most significant thing about Herodotus is ...

Has anyone bothered to publish the correspondence of President Harry S. Truman and his Secretary of State (and beloved friend) Dean Acheson...