Mackinder, Geography, and History

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...
‘Only Power Restrains Power’

‘Only Power Restrains Power’

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...

Churchill After the War

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,...

A Global Life in Ideas

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...

A Thundering Paradox of a Life

George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis. New York: The Penguin Press. 2011. 784 pp. $40. William Manchester in his acclaimed biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar, introduced his subject as a “thundering paradox of a man.” The same could be...