Ismet Inonu

Turkey, Eight Decades Later

Two days before flying to Turkey for a few days, I found a little book published in 1944 titled La Turquie d’Ismet Ineunu (The Turkey of Ismet Inonu). It was published by Fernand Sorlot not long before the end of the Occupation. Fernand Sorlot was the publisher who had been sued by Hitler in the French courts for having published a complete ...


Great Shakes

I was going to write another heavy duty current events data analysis column, but then I got distracted and/or lazy, so this essay is going to wander off to a more fun topic. When I saw the headline that senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) ...

Scholars Rank Biggest Spending Presidents as the Greatest

Before President Joe Biden entered the White House, he consulted with several prominent historians about how to be a great commander in chief. Their answer: Grow government. Spend, spend, spend. Don't worry about blowing up the ...

New York City

Bye-Bye, Bagel

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a property in the Swiss Alps is in no need of a house in New York City. With apologies to old Jane, I am seriously contemplating giving up living in the Big Bagel after ...

Generational Gobbledygook: Astrology for MBAs

As we are constantly lectured, race does not exist. Yet, almost nobody points out that the conventional wisdom that races are wholly arbitrary social constructs is actually far truer for the popular concept of “generations,” such as ...

Purge and Cleanse, No Loose Ends

It’s a tradition ’round these parts (and by “these parts” I mean my desktop, comfy chair, and rum bottle) to end December by cleaning house of interesting bits and pieces I didn’t get to use during the year. Normally, this ...

Hugo Chávez

Chavez’s Successors

Some years ago, I vowed to catalog my books and tidy up my study before I died to make things a little easier for my executors. Among other things, this entailed throwing out the piles of magazines from several years ago still in their ...

The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries

The Dynamics of Repute

The rise and fall of fame—or at least of the number of times books mention the name of an artist or other historical figure—can be conveniently graphed using Google’s free Ngram Viewer. Google has digitized the contents of 129 ...

HRH Princess Elizabeth in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, 1945

She Gave Her Best

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of the House of Windsor was never supposed to have been Queen of Great Britain. Her uncle David, who had taken the name Edward for his reign, was very popular and would, no doubt and in due course, have children ...


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