The British Constitution: A Child of Conflict
Image above: the Magna Carta My headline for this book review derives from chapter 17 in volume 1, written by Robert Crowcroft (Univ. of Edinburgh). It is one of 42…
LYING POLITICIANS: The Fightback
Political lying is not confined to the United States. The governing body of Wales, the Senedd, is drafting legislation to make politicians liable to criminal prosecution for making false statements…
THE DANGER OF DREAMS
The Nobel laureate in literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, warned this month about the intersection of AI and human emotions. In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, he said “AI will become…
To Celebrate a Princely Birth
Spanish speakers: some 43 million people in the United States speak Spanish, with another 384 million in Central & South America. The main reason is because of the conquest of…
Lawless Republic
What would happen if a clique of very rich people, led by an autocrat, took over a Republic? What if he awarded grand gifts of money and power to the…
Stoicism: The enemy of Wordsworth’s muse
Photo: William Wordsworth Jacob Risinger, assistant professor of English at Ohio State University, has written a truly extraordinary book. The accepted worldview is that stoicism and romanticism mix like water…
Paris in the Belle Époque
The most recent issue of Transversal, the International Journal for the Historiography of Science, is devoted to the Belle Époque. The phrase has entered the English lexicon, but identifying what…
The Best of All Possible Worlds
To live in the 17th century, it was still possible to be an expert in everything. The phrase used to describe Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is “universal genius.” He lived from…
A Dazzling Star Banned in Texas
Photo: Primo Levi In January 2025, the PM of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, announced a revamping the school curriculum by introducing Latin studies. The education minister, Giuseppe Valditara, also wants to…
Rome’s second Emperor: Tiberius
Augustus was a hard act to follow. Rome’s first Emperor is widely considered to be one of the finest absolute rulers of all time. Quite literally, no one could measure…