The American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan called the First World War the “seminal catastrophe of [the twentieth] century.” Between 1914 and 1918, the major powers of Western civilization waged brutal and unrelenting war against each other, resulting in the...
Halford Mackinder (1861–1947) understood the forces that shape world politics better than any thinker of the twentieth century. When he delivered his famous address to the Royal Geographical Society in London in January 1904—an address that accurately foresaw the main...
James Burnham’s The Machiavellians at Seventy. Seventyyears ago, James Burnham, in the middle of his intellectual odyssey from Marxism to conservatism, wrote an insightful and timeless study of politics and the nature of political power in a book entitled The...
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid. Little Brown and Company, 2012. Hardcover, 1182 pages, $40. At the end of The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his history of the Second World War,...
Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick by Peter Collier. New York: Encounter Books, 2012. 241 pp. $26.Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was the intellectual giant of the first four years of the Reagan administration. After Reagan swept to a forty-nine-state...
The book’s defense of McCarthyism also fares even better over half a century after its publication, as the opening of the Soviet archives gave Americans far more information than the authors had in 1954 and made abundantly clear not only the reality of Soviet infiltration of the…
Today, we know so much more about the communist infiltration of our government and society in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in his early career. Yet, it turns out that Buckley and his allies were closer to the truth about domestic communism than their…