In the heart of downtown Aberdeen, the tea room is the Tastie Tattie Shop. Today’s menu features tatties and chili, and the girl I give my order to is wearing a stud in her nose. Aberdeen, the Granite City, looks built to last, but the...
“What are we doing about guerilla warfare?” asked President John F. Kennedy in January 1961, shortly alter he took office. The answer—at that time—not very much.
In First Monday in October, the movie that anticipated appointment of the first woman to the United States Supreme Court, Walter Matthau plays a role that amiably caricatures the late William O. Douglas. The plot is built around a...
The great chronicler of the diplomatic method, Harold Nicolson, once wrote that the origins of modern diplomacy can be traced to the “determinant” influence of Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu’s achievement was the development of a coterie of...
Granted, Adams’s persona was firmly wrapped in the mantle of failure—so much so that savvy readers soon suspected that he was protesting just a bit too much about his ignorance and ineptitude. Still, when he writes that “Nothing in...
In this biography, N. John Hall concentrates on the “facts” of Anthony Trollope’s career by presenting the effects of the novelist’s great creative energy and by recording the results of his multiple vocations and avocations. The Trollope...
However good, most newspaper articles are destined for the same fate as yesterday’s lead story—they wrap fish or line garbage cans. Sometimes, however, fate spares them such ignominy and places them between hard covers. This was the case...
