A model of a Roman siege tower. You can’t see them, but it actually rolls on wheels.

Here’s an excerpt from Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, from a translation by Rex Warner: “When our army reached their territory (the Aduatuci, descendants of the Cimbri and the Teutones, who had gone on a rampage in the Roman province in Gaul a generation earlier and had been defeated by Caesar’s […]

Armand Caulaincourt, Duke of Vincenza, Master of Horse to the Emperor Napoleon, actually returned to France with Napoleon after the retreat from Moscow in the famous Berlin Coach.

This passage is from With Napoleon in Russia by General Armand Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s Master of Horse during the invasion of Russia, and describes conditions during their disastrous retreat from Moscow: “The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. Bad luck for those who fell asleep by a […]

Armand Augustin Louis, Marquis de Caulaincourt in his own right, was a French aristocrat who lived through the Revolution because he was serving in the army, where he had been promoted on his own merits in the revolutionary government’s struggles with invasions by French aristrocrats and the royalist governments they […]

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, known as Sallust, describes Rome after the defeat of Carthage in 146 BCE: (This passage is from “A history of Rome from its origins to 529 A.D. as told by the Roman historians” prepared by Moses Hadas.) The nobility turned its dignity, and the populace its liberty, […]

A war connived at by a cabal of right-wing warmongers in Washington, an occupation resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of local inhabitants. Surely this catastrophic blunder by the Bush administration is unprecedented in American history. Not. George F. Kennan, in his lecture series, […]

Got a very insightful comment from a reader in Arlington, Massachusetts, who asks how I can deplore rape and murder by American soldiers in Iraq and still say that Augustus Caesar was “quite a guy” for bringing centuries of peace and prosperity to the Mediterranean World. I’m always delighted by […]

The founding principle of this blog has always been that it’s not about me, but about the books. That’s a good principle, but as Nero Wolfe’s sidekick Archie Goodwin says, “There are times when a principle should take a nap.” In the light of recent events, I cannot fail to […]

There was a bit I wanted very much to put into my story on West Ireland, but it just didn’t fit. It took too long to explain and as it turns out, I really didn’t understand it myself at the time. But I’ve had a chance to think about it […]