I see my friends getting all excited for the new season of Game of Thrones. It almost makes me wish for HBO. But as I’ve said before, I’ve read the books, and as I’ve said before, Martin has drawn heavily on the actual history of 15th-century England in creating his saga. Sure, most people with… Read More Game of Roses, or How George R.R. Martin Gave New Names to Historical Persons
Which, of course, we knew. The Tale of the Diadochi would make a grand tragedy were it not so feverishly complicated. There have to be five or six tragic heroes among them, each one more hubris-laden than the next. But this book, which I’ve just started: …spells out everything in clear, beat-by-beat style. There’s probably… Read More Alexander the Great Haunted His Followers For Decades
Sarah Hoyt addresses the elephant in in the doublet: Anyway, so every author agrees Henry VIII as a young man was a true renaissance man, good at everything and so very good looking. And every author wonders what dread disease caused him to turn not just into a murderous tyrant, but a stupid murderous tyrant… Read More Henry VIII and His Desperate Dynasty
It’s 9/11, and I’ve mostly given up blogging about 9/11, because I don’t have anything new to say on it. My Year Ten at Ground Zero post at Revolutionary Nonsense pretty much summed it up: So, with the shattered Towers transformed into watered gravestones for those eternally interred by them, we can at last put… Read More Bloggers Don’t Die, They Just Burn Out.
Victor Davis Hanson calls out the steps, and our progressive New Class masters dance to them: Sometime in the mid-first century a.d., an otherwise little known consular official, Gaius Petronius, wrote a brilliant satirical novel about the gross and pretentious new Roman-imperial elite. The Satyricon is an often-cruel parody about how the Roman agrarian republic… Read More Welcome to Imperial Rome
I’m sure there was a premise to this, and I’m sure 90% of the people that knew it did not care. I remember this dystopian hawker from my childhood, and even had a penchant for warbling “M-M-Max Headroom-room” at inappropriate intervals during my elementary school years. Behold the horror: The past is truly unknowable.
A while back, I jumped off an article about one of the world’s remaining functional monarchies, that of Morocco, to an argument that survival was the key to success for a monarch. I used the Capetians as an example. Today I’m going to unsay a little of that, and use as an example a dynasty… Read More Medieval Dynastic Fail: The Normans
150 years ago, today, my great-great-great-grand-uncle, Dallas Patrick, a private in 11th Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry (40th Volunteers), was taking part in the largest land battle ever to take place on the North American continent. I’ve been to Gettysburg on several occasions, and some part of me would kind of like to be there to see… Read More The Myths of Gettysburg
Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that nothing is new under the sun, and the old books remind us that we’ve been here before. (via Ace) We can learn from classics that most of us are more likely to resent superiority than to reward it, to distrust talent than to develop it. With classical training, our… Read More Why You Should Read the Classics
One has to admit, Roger Ebert, Margaret Thatcher and Annette Funnicello make rather an odd threesome (but then, so did John Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley). I don’t have much to say about any of them. Ebert was the guy who told us whether movies were worth the money and hassle to see in… Read More Rest in Peace, Oh Lady of Iron.
Content Blues 