What I am reading… Solzhenitsyn on his limited experience
From a review of recent books on Solzhenitsyn come this brief account of the conservative Russian…
Poem: History
History No thing these days is as it seems, And ideas… well, don’t trust them. I…
What I am reading … the Opium war and chai
I am reading Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: the Opium War and the end of China’s last…
What I am reading… Weber’s iron cage and prophecy of cultural demise
Two passages from Max Weber’s The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: “The Puritan wanted…
What I am reading… the death of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrígo Borgia)
From Christopher Hibbert, The Borgias and their enemies, 1431-1519, two anecdotes from the death of the…
Identity Crisis – some theses on identity politics
What are we to make of the phenomenon of identity politics? Here are some exploratory theses….
On the traumatic origins of Machiavelli’s The Prince
I have been watching Medici: Masters of Florence and The Borgias over the last fortnight, and…
Could the culture wars descend into civil wars?
Over at the online magazine Quilette, a Shakespeare scholar at a minor English university, Neerna Parvini,…
The slow death of my history
Over the last couple of months I have been reading history. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs:…
The meaning of a coup
Barely a week ago Australia was gripped in political drama – a clumsily organised coup was…