A collection of 450 posts
In an excellent new biography of Rasputin, British military historian Antony Beevor argues that perception can be a more powerful shaper of world events than reality.
The transatlantic slave trade was a monstrous crime against humanity. Yet it represented just one example of an ancient evil that spanned many civilisations.
Where local collaboration is absent, foreign intervention imposes enormous costs or simply stalls. Where it exists, intervention can succeed with surprising velocity.
Éric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978) vividly recreates the imaginative world in which the people of the Middle Ages lived inside their heads.
The structural case for why collectivist systems fail.
Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s new book tries to convince readers that Western civilisation doesn’t exist.
Southeast Asia in World War II, Part Three: Independence Movements under Japanese Occupation
Why Germans fear American religion, and what this reveals about Europe.
In geopolitics, moral culture shapes whether influence is experienced as leadership or domination, cooperation or coercion.
Southeast Asia in World War II, Part Two: The Japanese Occupation and Its Repercussions
Populist rhetoric is exceptionally effective for pursuing and gaining power, but it provides no program for the complexities of actual governance.
Southeast Asia in World War II, Part One: Japanese Conquests and British Disgrace
How a 10th-century warrior-statesman forged a unified England and why his legacy still matters in our identity-obsessed day.
The longevity of the Epstein story owes less to new facts of criminal conduct than to its symbolic utility in alleging deviancy.
The century-old moral panics and persecutions by Anthony Comstock and the Society for the Suppression of Vice are echoed today by cancellation campaigns from the moralistic Left and Right.