Early Modern Queens
Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power By Leah Redmond Chang. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023. Hardcover, 512 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. In the Anglophone world, there is one (and only one) Renaissance queen: Elizabeth Tudor....
Sailing East
Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company, 1550-1650 By David Howarth. Yale University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 480 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. One of the most popular phrases among Marxists during the long reign of Barack H. Obama was...
Virtue in the Age of Neo-Machiavellianism
Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena By James Hankins. Harvard University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 448 pages, $55. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. We live in a Neo-Machiavellian age. Gone are the “End of History”...
Germans at War
Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500 By Peter H. Wilson. Belknap Press, 2023. Hardcover, 976 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!