Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is gargantuan. Really. This intellectual history clocks in at over 760 pages. It narrates various theorists’ attempts to discover and describe the principles of strategy over the last few centuries of Western thought. Freedman covers many definitions of the word ‘strategy’ but never settles on any one of them: the […]
Flappers playing mahjong. Image source. Last week’s post, “If You Were to Write a History of 21st Century America, What Would It Look Like?,” asked what a 21st century version of Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s might look like. Here is how I described the book in that post: […]
One of the best histories I have had the pleasure to read is Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. There are many things to love about this book. Allen wrote his history of the 1920’s in a jaunty, breezy style. When you pick his book up it is hard to […]
The large majority of our fellow-citizens care as much about literature as they care about aeroplanes or the programme of the Legislature. They do not ignore it; they are not quite indifferent to it. But their interest in it is faint and perfunctory; or, if their interest happens to be violent, it is spasmodic. Ask […]
“Bag End” by Tim Doyle.You can purchase this print here. Deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. The one small garden […]
Image Source A new year has arrived, and that means it is time to post my annual list of every book I have finished since the last new year’s day. I have kept a list of every book I have read, along with a few short comments summarizing and casting judgment on each title, since […]
A picture of a book shelf I own. We often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select society of all the centuries […]
Vasily Perov, Portrait of Dostoevsky, 1872. The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and co-operation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. […]
Norman Rockwell, draft version of Freedom of Speech (1943). “In the United States… there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined power of individuals.” —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol I (1835) American democracy and the civic life that supports it is in decline. This is […]
Military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated. —Carl von Clausewitz, On War I have a new double-book review up at Strategy Bridge. This time both books were written by the same person: King’s College […]
