I’ve been watching ‘The Winds of War’ a tv miniseries based on the novel by Herman Wouk. ‘The Winds of War’ and a second novel, ‘War and Remembrance’ are two excellent works about World War II. I say ‘excellent’ instead of brilliant, because the characters are shuffled around by their […]

I want to pass along a story I heard recently from a 92-year-old friend of mine who was 10 years old when the Russians drove the Nazis out of his home country, Hungary. He lived in a small village outside a city that the Russians were bombing, sending up flares […]

People remember Sir Peter Ustinov as one of the greatest actors of all time and for his tireless work for UNICEF. A few recall that he was also a playwright. His play ‘Romanoff and Juliette’ – a spoof of the Cold War – was a worldwide success and was made […]

When I was a callow youth at the Groton School, I worked at the bookstore and for some reason I ordered and read all the novels of Aldous Huxley. I don’t remember a thing about any of them except the opening scene of Eyeless in Gaza, where a man and […]

On the morning of September 1, 1675, the residents of Hadley, a town of some fifty families, were gathered in their newly built meetinghouse. They had settled the town in 1659, having left Connecticut because of a dispute about the ritual of baptism. At first their pastor, the Rev. John […]

John Bell Hood is one of several Confederate generals who have major US Army bases named after them. While I don’t think, in general, that we should name army bases after enemy generals, in this case it might be apt because John Bell Hood, almost singlehandedly, lost the Civil War. […]

I’ve written several entries about The Armada by Garrett Mattingly because it is a prodigious work of scholarship, and, unlike so very very many prodigious works of scholarship, this is a ripping good read. Not surprisingly it won the Pulitzer Prize and it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. You get […]

I’ve just reread The Armada by Garrett Mattingly, and would like to say again that this is one of those books that makes you reassess everything you thought you knew, in this case about European history. I used to think that the Thirty Years War in Germany was between Protestants […]

I just braved the perils of the Hutchinson Parkway and the Brueckner Expressway to visit my daughter Sarah and her husband Ian in New York. Of course the main attraction was my one-year-old granddaughter Esben, but I also wanted to deliver Leela the Lilac bush to Sarah’s terrace garden, and […]