A Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger is a book so opposite to All Quiet on the Western Front so thoroughly as to be hardly discussing the same war. And in a sense, they are. Storm of Steel is essentially a diary, a recitation of facts and occurrences, held together by the observer. All Quiet, is a… Read More The Merry Spirit of War
Per historian A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War, which was something of a classic when it came out, but has since passed on, due to its somewhat nuanced take. The first thing that Taylor argues, rather effectively, is that no one was more surprised than Hitler to find himself at war with Britain… Read More The Surprising Cause of the Second World War
Quintus Curtius has a fine article on his web site about Pompey’s most impressive victory: Every victory seems easy in retrospect, of course. But the campaign against the pirates was successful for very specific reasons. They are as follows: (1) deployment of sufficient forces to deal with the threat; (2) assignment of specific sectors of… Read More Pompey’s Counter-Insurgency
Quentin Tarantino has a new movie out, which has the Tate-LaBianca killings in its backdrop, and I both do and don’t want to see it. I want to see it because I’m a fan of Tarantino’s work and have been since I first saw Pulp Fiction as a college freshman. Then as now, no one makes… Read More Thoughts on Charles Manson
The Kingdoms of Bran the Broken is neither a Kingdom nor is it Bran’s. Discuss. This analysis, from A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, argues that the introduction of Elective Monarchy to Westeros, and especially the election of Bran Stark as its first elected king, is doomed to failure. The reasons are as follows: With the… Read More Bran Stark is Hosed – A Reasonable Prediction From the End of Game of Thrones
There’s a throwaway line in Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X, wherein two FBI agents who’ve been wiretapping the titular character, and are listening to him have a heartfelt conversation on the phone with his wife. One of the agents says to the other “compared to King, this guy’s a monk.” That movie came out in 1992.… Read More The Story is That We’re Ignoring the Story
So sayeth this review of The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise. (h/t Vox Populi) And yes, the reviewer is an Orthodox priest, if you want to ready your ad hominems, and he is positively scathing regarding the myth, even working in a Gone With the Wind reference. As Fernandez-Morera’s book points out, the picture of a tolerant Islam… Read More No, Islamic Spain was Not Tolerant
In History, the details are always hard to catch, yet always worth knowing. This long post at History for Atheists, worth absorbing in full, makes a number of discordant points about the Myth that the Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed by a Christian mob in 390 AD, thus setting science and technology back a… Read More Myths of the Great Library
I don’t link much to National Review anymore, but the resurrection of the popular image of Ulysses S. Grant has been a cause of mine since I wrote a bad term paper about it in college. A pertinent fact: Grant was one of the more popular presidents of his era, winning two lopsided elections and… Read More Rethinking President Grant
… it’s not actually about Alexander the Great, but some nonsense tertially related to Alexander the Great. Normally I like Crash Course, because it doesn’t take itself too seriously and usually provides some kind of interesting take on historical events. But this one is trying so hard to be Woke that it ends up saying… Read More This Crash Course is the Last Christmas of Alexander the Great YouTube Videos…
Content Blues 