World War Two
Published 16 Jul 2026Virginia Hall was one of the most extraordinary spies of World War II. An American operative for Britain’s Special Operations Executive and later the OSS, Hall built resistance networks in occupied France, coordinated intelligence, organized safe houses, helped escaped prisoners and airmen, and supported maquis fighters who sabotaged German operations during the liberation of France.
Known to the Gestapo as “the Limping Lady”, Hall worked with a wooden prosthetic leg she nicknamed Cuthbert. After escaping over the Pyrenees, she returned to France in 1944 in disguise, operating a radio, arranging parachute drops, and helping organize resistance forces against the German occupation.
This is the true story of Virginia Hall: the disabled American spy who became one of the most feared Allied agents in Nazi-occupied Europe — and one of the most important women in WWII intelligence history.
July 18, 2026
The Top WW2 Spy Was a Disabled Woman
July 15, 2026
QotD: First up against the wall, come the revolution
An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder.
A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.
He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.
Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.
Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.
Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.
When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.
He had set forces in motion that he could not control.
He suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. His doctors and family sent him to the French Riviera to recover. He checked into a hotel in Cannes. There, he apparently shot himself, though rumors persisted for years that he had been murdered and the suicide had been staged.
His wife Zinaida returned to Russia and continued living off the enormous fortune her husband had left behind. Then came 1917. The Bolsheviks seized everything. She survived by selling off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to keep.
The lavish country estate she and her husband owned later became the personal residence of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the communist revolution. Today it is a museum called Lenin’s Gorki, filled with the possessions and mementos of the first leader of the Soviet Union.
In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin points out that in most cases of societal collapse and state breakdown, “the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites … were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.”
Rob Henderson, “Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2026-03-22.
July 14, 2026
Orson Welles – the great failures
On his Substack, Ted Gioia looks at the up-and-down-and-up-and-down career of Orson Welles and selects, from a long list, his ten greatest failures:
Orson Welles in 1937.
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons.
It takes a lifetime of misses to create those hits (if they come at all). And those misses tell the real story of our passion, our resilience, our willingness to push our talent to the limit.
These speculations have led me to return to the work of filmmaker Orson Welles (1915-1985) — who I see as an inspiring role model for indie creators of the digital age. Welles is like many of us today. He lost institutional support from Hollywood studios while still in his twenties. And despite his reputation as the most innovative filmmaker of his generation — for many years his debut movie Citizen Kane won polls as the best film of all time — was forced into a precarious life as a perennial freelancer.
He spent most of his career working on projects that failed. And not because they weren’t good (see the list below) — but for other reasons. Some blame Welles’s prickly personality. Others will fault close-minded Hollywood execs. Or maybe Welles was just cursed with bad luck — problems did seem to follow him wherever he went.
You might say that even his hits were misses. His biggest early success came via a 1938 radio rendition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which convinced many listeners that extraterrestrials were actually invading America. Welles got plenty of publicity but was threatened with $12 million in lawsuits in the aftermath. He was lucky to escape without criminal charges.
His greatest triumph, Citizen Kane, was also anything but a conventional hit. The major theater chains refused to book it — fearing punishment from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the thinly-disguised model for Kane. So even at the peak of his career, Welles had a target on his back.
It got worse from there. He couldn’t finish the editing of his second film The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — because FDR prodded him into going to Brazil as a cultural ambassador during World War II. So Welles was out-of-touch as the studio butchered his remarkable film, and even added a saccharine new ending. It’s testimony to Welles’s greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling.
After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him. He got occasional gigs (although more often as an actor). But this brilliant filmmaker never enjoyed job security or long-term institutional support. He was the permanent indie gadfly — always pitching projects and sometimes actually starting them. But rarely finishing them.
At his death in 1985, Welles left behind at least 19 unfinished projects. Add to that the many others he abandoned in earlier years. And then there are so many Welles concepts that hardly got started at all — but were promising ideas that deserved better. Finally, Welles suffers the added indignity of achieving some commercial successes (on radio or the stage) that are now lost to us — so even these must be counted among his misses, at least from the perspective of posterity.
Below I’ve listed Welles’s ten greatest failures. But I could have easily expanded it to twenty or thirty.
I do this as testimony to Welles’s greatness. From a mercenary perspective, these might be failures, but from an aesthetic standpoint they testify to a creative force that operated at the highest level of intensity for a full lifetime.
July 12, 2026
How Rome’s Survival Came Down To One 25-Year-Old General – The Second Punic War | EP 2
The Rest Is History
Published 5 Feb 2026What happened at the Battle of Ibera, a totemic though overlooked battle of the Punic Wars? With the forces of Carthage closing in on a depleted Rome, would a young Roman, Publius Cornelius Scipio resurrect the fortunes of the Republic? And, could he destroy Carthage’s most crucial power base in Europe?
Join Tom and Dominic, as they discuss this next phase of the Carthaginian Wars.
00:00 Intro: Rome’s “darkest hour” + Scipio teased as the Republic’s saviour
02:26 206 BC, Atlantic coast of Iberia
04:26 What’s “up” with Scipio?
12:05 Spain as hostile “sci-fi planet”
15:30 New Carthage (Cartagena)
18:09 215 BC crisis: Hasdrubal tries to march north
19:14 Battle of the Ebro
21:25 “Two rival pairs of brothers”
24:48 Rome’s commander problem
30:36 Scipio’s bold plan
31:37 New Carthage targeted
34:57 Sack of New Carthage
39:01 Hasdrubal crosses the Alps with elephants
39:59 Italy’s crisis for Rome
44:05 Battle by the Metaurus
47:23 Ilipa (206): Scipio crushes Mago and breaks Carthage’s Spanish power
49:52 Mago’s last throws
52:14 Scipio returns to Rome as a superstar
53:05 Senate authorises Africa invasion
(more…)
July 4, 2026
The Dark Truth Behind America’s National Anthem
The Rest Is History
Published 8 Jun 2026How did the War of 1812 result in America’s national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner? Who came up with it? And, why does this origin story make the anthem so controversial?
Join Dominic and Tom as they launch into the first episode of their Football World Cup special, with the story behind America’s national anthem, and its secret story.
0:00 – Lloyd’s
01:21 – The Star-Spangled Banner
02:43 – A World Cup Series on National Anthems
04:08 – America’s Most Controversial Anthem
05:00 – The Forgotten War of 1812
09:10 – Britain Strikes Back
11:39 – Francis Scott Key Boards the British Fleet
15:27 – The Bombardment of Fort McHenry
18:14 – The Giant Flag That Inspired the Anthem
20:41 – Francis Scott Key Writes the Poem
23:28 – Why the Anthem Used an Old English Tune
26:13 – The Anacreontic Song
29:07 – How the Song Became a Hit
30:37 – The Times
31:48 – Is The Star-Spangled Banner About Slavery?
36:08 – Escaped Slaves and the British Army
40:55 – The People Who Found Freedom Under the Union Jack
42:29 – Francis Scott Key’s Complicated Legacy
47:06 – The Song Spreads Across America
51:39 – Why America Took So Long to Get a National Anthem
56:42 – How It Finally Became the Anthem
57:06 – Controversial Performances
1:00:17 – Colin Kaepernick and Taking the Knee
1:02:39 – Can You Separate the Anthem from the Author?
1:03:03 – The Abolitionist Version of the Anthem
1:04:13 – Coming Next: God Save the King
1:06:33 – The Rest Is History ClubVideo Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton
Social Producer: Harry Balden
Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude
Senior Producer: Callum Hill
Executive Producer: Dom Johnson
Chief Digital Officer: Sam Oakley
June 30, 2026
QotD: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Marx himself was an odious individual. An unkempt scrounger and a savage polemicist, he liked to boast that his wife was “née Baroness von Westphalen” but was not above siring an illegitimate son by their maidservant. On the sole occasion when he applied for a job (as a railway clerk) he was rejected because his handwriting was so atrocious. He sought to play the stock market but was hopeless at it. For most of his life he therefore depended on handouts from Engels, for whom socialism was an evening hobby, along with foxhunting and womanizing; his day job was running one of his father’s cotton factories in Manchester (the patent product of which was known as Diamond Thread). No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton.
The essence of Marxism was the belief that the industrial economy was doomed to produce an intolerably unequal society divided between the bourgeoisie, the owners of capital, and a property-less proletariat. Capitalism inexorably demanded the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands and the reduction of everyone else to wage slavery, which meant being paid only “that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer”. In chapter 32 of the first tome of Capital (1867), Marx prophesied the inevitable denouement:
Along with the constant decrease of the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class …
The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
It is no coincidence that this passage has a Wagnerian quality, part Götterdämmerung, part Parsifal. But by the time the book was published the great composer had left the spirit of 1848 far behind. Instead it was Eugene Pottier’s song “The Internationale” that became the anthem of Marxism. Set to music by Pierre De Geyter, it urged the “servile masses” to put aside their religious “superstitions” and national allegiances and to make war on the “thieves” and their accomplices, the tyrants, the generals, princes and peers.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
June 26, 2026
Magda Goebbels: The Nazi Mother Who Murdered Her Children
World War Two
Published 25 Jun 2026Magda Goebbels was one of the most infamous women in Hitler’s inner circle. Known as the wife of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and often treated as an unofficial “First Lady” of the Third Reich, she helped project an image of family, elegance, and loyalty while standing beside one of history’s most murderous regimes. But her story ends in one of the darkest acts of the Second World War.
As Berlin collapsed in 1945, Magda Goebbels took her six children into Hitler’s Führerbunker. Offered chances to escape, she refused. One day after Hitler’s suicide, she helped murder her own children with cyanide, claiming that a world without National Socialism was not worth living in.
In this episode of our new format, Baddies and Battleaxes, Anna Deinhard returns to tell the story of Magda Goebbels: socialite, Nazi fanatic, mother, accomplice, and child murderer. Her life reveals how women in the Third Reich were not always passive bystanders. Some, like Magda, actively embraced Nazi ideology, helped legitimize the regime, and chose loyalty to Hitler over humanity itself.
This is the story of the Nazi “First Lady” who followed fascism all the way into the bunker.
Who should Anna cover next in Baddies and Battleaxes? Tell us which heroines and villainesses of WW2 you want to see in a future episode.
June 20, 2026
Caesar Augustus – The man and his story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 28 Jan 2026An overview of the career of the man who became Rome’s first princeps (or emperor as we would call him). Heir to Julius Caesar’s private estate, he somehow managed to make himself Caesar’s adopted son and political successor, plunging himself into Rome’s violent politics at the age of just nineteen and in turn beating all his rivals. Supreme master of the Roman empire in his early thirties, he then ruled for four decades, profoundly changing Rome, its empire — and by extension shaping the modern world.
My biography of the man — Augustus: First Emperor of Rome is being released as a new edition from Basic Books in the USA on 27th January 2026.
June 18, 2026
QotD: James K. Polk – a dark horse?
The truth is that Polk’s political opponents knew very well who James K. Polk was — and why they should fear him. Yet almost two centuries later, despite solid standing in modern presidential polls and a portrait that currently graces the Oval Office, Polk’s legacy is entwined in mischaracterizations.
The Myth of the Dark Horse
Many will tell you that Polk was a dark horse. No, he was not.
Born in North Carolina in 1795, Polk aspired to the presidency at least from his first election to the Tennessee House of Representatives at the age of twenty-eight. He always had what every budding politician craves: the unqualified support of the era’s greatest hero. Although some vilified Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory was a political force that could not be denied. With Jackson’s encouragement, Polk entered politics and then married Sarah Childress, whom Andrew and Rachel Jackson treated as a daughter.
Prior to his nomination, Polk had served seven terms in Congress, including two as Speaker of the House; he had been governor of Tennessee; and he had tried to unseat the sitting vice president to become President Martin Van Buren’s running mate in 1840. To be sure, there were defeats along the way. Polk lost his first try for the Speakership and two gubernatorial campaigns in Tennessee, a state as bitterly divided as any between Jackson’s Democrats and emerging Whig forces.
But Polk never lost sight of the prize. Even in defeat, he continued to correspond with Democratic leaders across the country. His presidential nomination in 1844 at a convention divided over the annexation of Texas may well have been — as one of his most ardent supporters advised — four years ahead of schedule. After all, former president Van Buren, who had lost his reelection campaign in 1840, again sought the nomination in 1844. But Polk was not a dark horse suddenly surging from the back of the field. He was in the arena and one of the most astute and well-connected politicians of his day.
Walter R. Borneman, “James K. Polk and the 5,106 Votes That Changed America”, Coolidge Review, 2026-02-20.
June 12, 2026
QotD: George Bernard Shaw
On the other hand, he was one of the few playwrights in English whose plays can still be performed for the pleasure of an audience a century later. One or two of them might even, without absurdity, be called great. He was undoubtedly very witty, and if he was unbearably opinionated, his prose was always vigorous and quite often elegant. I learned to write from him. Many of his bons mots are still nearly as funny as those of Oscar Wilde.
It was as a playwright — one whose fame stretched around the world — not as a thinker or guide to policy that he is commemorated in the name of the theatre [at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]. His plays have been in print ever since they were written. His achievements in the theatre can hardly be denied. He is virtually the founder of the modern drama in English. I can extract at least 20 of his plays from the vaults of my mind.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Man and Underman at RADA”, City Journal, 2020-09-17.
June 10, 2026
QotD: Tiberius Gracchus, Tribune of the Plebs
And here it is worth noting that kind of government the Romans had to understand the response. The Roman Republic had written laws but no written constitution – instead, the rules for office holding, for conducting the business of the Senate, for running the assemblies and so on were all customary: the Romans governed themselves in accordance with what they called the mos maiorum, “the custom of the ancestors”. In a sense then, certain practices, if practiced long enough, became a sort of law-of-tradition to themselves and of course one of those customs – practiced at this point for, at minimum around 150 years – was the continual leasing of large amounts of ager publicus to the point that the leases were treated as a form of ownership: people used that land as security for loans, they built houses on it, they buried their parents on it and so on. Because the leases were presumptively renewable and had been for decades if not centuries, under the mos maiorum, the holders of ager publicus had long considered the land theirs. And of course the upset parties are rich and powerful, so their opposition was significant and meaningful, politically.
In brief, the way this plays out is that while Tiberius Gracchus does have significant popular support for his motion (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 9.1), much of the elite are opposed. He draws up a quite conciliatory version of the law, which proposes to compensate the holders of large amounts of ager publicus for their lost leasing rights and to then give them the remainder of their leased land (so they needn’t fear a second lex agraria and a third and a fourth and so on), but according to Plutarch in the face of continued elite opposition, shifts back to a less conciliatory version of the law (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 10.3). The resistance to his law centers on another tribune, Marcus Octavius, himself a large holder of public lands, who plans to veto the law and uses his own powers as a tribune to disrupt the process (along with some fairly clear shenanigans by some of the wealthy, like trying to hide the voting urns to prevent a vote on the law and so on).
Now there are a few things to note at this juncture in the story. First, there being ten tribunes, it must never have been very hard to find a tribute willing to gum up the passage of a given law, but that, traditionally, this was a tactic of delay, rather than a hard-stop the way Octavius is using it. At the same time, with real public momentum to make this law happen, one could easily imagine simply waiting Octavius out – he only has one year in office. Except. Except that, remember, Tiberius Gracchus needs a big victory in his tribunate to get his political career [back] on track, a consideration that was clearly significant (thus the reason we’re informed of his quaestorship; we usually don’t know much about even very significant figures’ time in junior offices!). That consideration, I think, serves as important context for Tiberius’ decision to escalate every time he encounters resistance: he cannot afford to simply be the prelude to someone else passing this law: he needs to pass it himself.
The normal method for “deconflicting” two magistrates with opposing vetoes like this was to go to the Senate, which Tiberius Gracchus, hoping his influential supporters would carry the day, did. Instead, according to Plutarch (Ti. Gracch. 11.2) the Senate was merely no help, whereas Appian (BCiv 1.12) describes the Senate as openly upbraiding Tiberius, a strong negative response. Now under the mos maiorum, that would be the end of it: the authority of the Senate (the auctoritas senatus) ought to be so intense that when the Senate speaks in one voice and says, “not right now” then you desist. Remember that in the Roman conception, the Republic is a partnership of sorts between the Senate and the People (the S and the P in SPQR), rather than a situation in which the Senate is purely subordinate to the popular will: if the Senate is strongly opposed, that is supposed to be a veto point that is respected.
But remember: Tiberius Gracchus cannot, politically, desist. He must push through because his political career requires a victory this year. Note that the cause does not require a victory in 133; there is nothing to stop another tribune in 132 from trying to advance the same bill or a more limited or different version of it. But Tiberius Gracchus’ career absolutely requires success in 133. So instead of desisting, he escalates.
He now breaks clearly with the mos maiorum and plans to take his law directly to the people against the advice of the Senate. Octavius is obviously a problem – he’ll veto anything Tiberius Gracchus tries to do – so Tiberius Gracchus introduces a law to depose Octavius from office. The Roman Republic doesn’t have anything like impeachment, there is no framework to remove someone from office. Instead, the way the Republic works is that all of the offices are held for short duration (one year) and while tribunes and office holders with imperium are immune from prosecution while in office, they can be prosecuted the moment they leave office for any crimes they committed. There is no framework for booting out a tribune like this; the remedy in the customary Roman system is to make sure the next year you elect tribunes who support the idea and try to pass it then. But that remedy doesn’t work for Tiberius Gracchus.
So Tiberius Gracchus passes the law deposing Octavius and then has him dragged from the speaker’s platform (the rostra) and now we have a problem. Because of course Octavius’ supporters are going to view this law itself as illegal and invalid: tribunes are, you will recall sacrosanct, so it’s not clear they can be deposed and it is very clear they cannot be assaulted or dragged. Violating the sacrosanctity of a tribune is, at least notionally, a capital offense and a severe violation of religion and if you think that Tiberius Gracchus’ legal basis for all of this is rubbish, you think he just did it twice. Of course, Tiberius is also a tribune, so you can’t attack him now, but once his year is done, you are probably planning to haul him in to court and let a jury decide if what he did was legal or not.2
In any case, with Octavius removed, Tiberius passes his land reform bill. The law provided for a three-man commission to handle the assessment of what public land was held in excess and then to hand it out. Tiberius Gracchus names as those commissioners himself, his brother and his father-in-law (Appius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 143)). Needless to say, that is a set of commissioners which does not inspire a lot of confidence that the commission will be uncorrupted by politics, a point we’ll get back to in just a moment.
In the meantime, the Senate looked to exert its traditional prerogative over state funds (as it advised the quaestors who superintended the treasury) to hamstring the new commission, but Tiberius Gracchus took advantage of the recent death of Attalus III, King of Pergamum. Attalus had notionally willed his kingdom “to the Roman people” – he had no clear heirs and so perhaps thought by this act to get the Romans to pick one of his relatives to run the kingdom, thus avoiding a damaging civil war – but instead Tiberius, getting the news early, rushed to pass a law annexing the kingdom and using the windfall to fund his commission. The law passes, but this is a breach both of the Senate’s traditional power over state finances, but also its very important role managing Roman foreign policy.
What I want to note in this sequence which is important for understanding what comes next is that Tiberius Gracchus has just demonstrated that, so long as he remained popular, he could use the powers of the tribunate to essentially run the Roman state from the tribune’s chair. Tiberius has now forced not merely a domestic land issue, but also a finance issue and a foreign policy issue over the objection of the Senate and another elected tribune, essentially running roughshod over all of the customary limits intended to keep any one Roman politician from coming to dominate the Roman political system.
Of course if you were an opponent of Tiberius Gracchus, you could at least tell yourself that this is all bad, but at the very least, Tiberius Gracchus will be out of office next year, as it was contrary to custom to run for any office immediately after holding it. Indeed, it was unusual to hold basically any office more than once, save for the consulship (and even then, only for very successful consuls and never multiple years in a row). Those limits are customary but everything about the Roman Republic is customary; if you discounted the mos maiorum, there wouldn’t be any republic left. You’d instead expect that Tiberius would go back to being a senator for a few years while planning his shot at the praetorship – during which he’ll have to survive a series of court battles over the legality of his actions.
So even if he is doing potentially outrageous, dangerous things, at least he’ll be gone in a year, right?
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
- Which, again, noting the complications above, probably means applying that limit for the first time to at least some classifications of land it had not applied to before and also applying it against the socii.
- The Roman court system leaves questions of law – which in most modern courts would be decided by a judge – to the jury itself.
June 7, 2026
Are “Dad books” in trouble?
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte views with (mild) alarm a recent Wall Street Journal article claiming that “Dad books” — the kind of books thoughtful kids give their fathers as gifts — are in steep decline:
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece last month on the death of Dad books, the Father’s Day specials — books about “some little-known chapter of World War II, the sweeping narrative of a shipwreck, perhaps the latest presidential biography”.
Here’s what it gave for evidence. Nonfiction book sales have declined for four years, including an 8 percent drop this year up to May 9.
Sales of Books about politics and current affairs are down 19 percent in those same four months and nine days in 2026. The article quotes, among others, former Simon & Schuster publisher Jonathan Karp saying that “this is a sea change and people should wake up and realize we’re living in a new world”.
The new world is one with “an endless supply of Substack newsletters, Netflix documentaries, YouTube videos and podcasts that offer the kind of fresh reporting, sharp analysis and historical perspective once limited doorstop-size books”.
Jonathan Burnham of Harper Group adds that all these alternatives to books make “the idea of sitting down with a 700-page Ron Chernow book less appealing. You’ve scratched that itch.”
The WSJ noted that Chernow’s recent biography of Mark Twain, published last spring, is underperforming his 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant.
There was an obligatory quote from Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt, who attributed the decline in serious nonfiction sales to the fact that everyday events are all-consuming: “The world is exceptionally interesting right now and when that happens the nonfiction reader is reading the news instead.”
As someone who publishes a lot of Dad books, i.e., serious researched nonfiction, histories and biographies, that sort of thing, I read the article with concern. In fact, I read it twice.
I felt much better after the second reading.
Let’s start with the chart. The first four months and 9 days of 2026 are doing all the work here. A decline of 1 to 2 percent in the years 2023 to 2025 is statistical noise. Circana BookScan numbers don’t include audiobooks, which have been rising steadily in popularity. The very slight decline in sales for the first three years might be entirely attributable to format shifting, hardcopy to digital audio. The 8 percent decline in the first four months of 2026 looks more ominous, but book sales figures are always lumpy, never a straight line. A four-month sample tells you nothing.
The greater problem with the chart is that it is counting adult nonfiction book sales, not Dad books. There are any number of ways to cut Circana BookScan data, but the broad adult nonfiction category contains a vast array of books. Books for men, books for women, books for everybody. Not only serious researched nonfiction, but self-help, how-to, study guides, business and personal finance, psychology and religion books, health and fitness books, parenting books, food and travel books, true crime, sports, military, essays, crafts and hobbies, memoirs, etc. There is no data cut for Dad books. So the story is backing its thesis for the death of apples with stats about oranges.
The report of a 19 percent drop in the narrower category of politics and current affairs also looks ominous, but this is one of the most notoriously cyclical genres in existence. And, again, we’re discussing a short period of four months and nine days. The new Trump era was less than a year old at the start of that period. It generally takes longer than a year to get new books from commission to sale. Ten days after the end of the period under discussion, Andrew Weissmann released Liar’s Kingdom: How to Stop Trump’s Deceit and Save America. It was an instant number-one New York Times bestseller. In so specialized a category as this, Liar’s Kingdom alone might have been sufficient to right the ship.
The only other evidence presented to support the decline in Dad books is poor Ron Chernow’s journey. His Mark Twain, with 119,259 hardcover sales, is underperforming his Ulysses S. Grant, with 381,604 sales.
I don’t know where to start. The Grant book has been out for almost a decade, Twain for a year. Not surprising that it has sold less. Also, you can’t compare major political biographies to major cultural biographies. David McCullough’s biographies of Truman and Adams far outsold his book about American artists and writers in Paris. And while I’m a fan of Chernow, his Twain book isn’t his best work. He received polite and generally positive reviews, but they noted that the book is overly long — the word “exhaustive” surfaces repeatedly — and that he doesn’t entirely succeed in bringing Twain to life. Grant is a superior book, and the more enjoyable read, too, if customer reviews are anything to go by. The Twain sales prove nothing.
So we don’t really have any evidence at all that Dad books are in trouble, that they’re getting swamped by podcasts or current events, and certainly not that there’s been “a sea change” and that we’re living “in a new world”.
Amusingly, the literary world was flooded with hot new Dad books coincident with the WSJ‘s declaration of their death.
May 29, 2026
Julius Caesar: the final verdict
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 29 Oct 2025This week the questions are all about Julius Caesar, and in particular:
What were his motives? Did he aim at reform/revolution from the start?
Also, how was he viewed by the wider population after the Ides of March?
May 26, 2026
Gingerbread for Washington’s Army
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 2 Dec 2025Beautifully spiced gingerbread cookies formed in a sea goat mold
City/Region: England | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Time Period: 1773Christopher Ludwick was a true hero of the American Revolution. A German immigrant, he made his fortune in part by baking gingerbread in Philadelphia, and then used his baking knowledge, patriotic spirit, and all of his fortune to aid the American cause.
These gingerbread cookies are not as gingery as many modern ones, but the addition of mace, coriander seeds, and caraway seeds makes for a complex spiciness that is delicious. If you have gingerbread molds, these are a great time to use them, and if you don’t, they’re still delicious as cut-out cookies.
To Make Ginger-bread
Take a pound and a half of treacle, two eggs beaten, half a pound of brown sugar, an ounce of ginger beaten and sifted; of cloves, mace, and nutmegs all together half an ounce, beaten very fine, coriander-seeds and carraway-seeds of each half an ounce, two pounds of butter melted; mix all these together, with as much flour as will knead it into a pretty stiff paste; then roll it out, and cut it into what forms you please; bake it in a quick oven on tin plates; a little time will bake it.
— The Universal Cook or, the Lady’s Complete Assistant by John Townshend, 1773
May 25, 2026
Enoch Powell, in person
I posted an excerpt from Niccolo Soldo’s post on Enoch Powell last week, which might be why Substack called my attention to this post from Francis Turner, which includes some memories of personal interaction with Powell during a visit Powell paid to Turner’s father in the early 1980s:
No wonder he was vilified for telling the truth … he was completely correct.
As I commented on Niccolo’s post I had the fortune to meet Enoch Powell in the early 1980s. I think it would have been about April 1983 but I could be wrong. I don’t recall the reason Powell came, it could have been something to do with the Bible or Greek Patristics, it could have been theology, it could have been Gladstone or it could have been something totally different that I can’t guess. Anyway he spent a few days with my father for some reason and the two of them got on like a house on fire.
Both were Cambridge educated classicists, though my father was there a decade after Powell, and they had a number of other things in common. They were of essentially the same social class and similar background. Both had been in intelligence in WW2 and concentrated on the Japanese front. Both had been to India — my father as missionary, Powell as soldier in WW2. Both had learned Indian languages — Powell learned Urdu, my father Tamil. Both had worked with “working class” people — my father as a vicar in Rochdale, Powell as MP in Wolverhampton. They also shared a similar political outlook, though I don’t think they discussed politics much beyond sharing their distaste for Europe.
What I recall of those few days was what a nice man Enoch Powell was. As I mentioned in the comment, he helped me with my homework, which was Herodotus. I recall him, in addition to giving me specific advice, discussing with me and my father the various dialects of ancient Greek and how remarkable it was that an educated Greek in Constantinople could have read Herodotus written a thousand years or more earlier without much difficulty. I also recall him encouraging my father to learn German and even Russian because “you’ve learned two non Indo-European languages already, so both will be easy for you as a classicist”.1 Since Powell spoke (or at least read and wrote) multiple Indo-European languages, including both of those, he may have been optimistic but his encouragement undoubtedly helped.
He entirely failed to mention to me that he’d spent years as an academic studying Herodotus and had actually published a well known book about his work. But that did explain how he could know precisely what passage I was having trouble with from just the first few words.
One thing that stood out was his intellect. He wasn’t in any way patronizing but he made little attempt to disguise his brains. He started off assuming you could more or less keep up and would adjust down until you did. He was also curious about new things. I don’t think he was faking it when he asked me about home computers and what good they were for. I’m not entirely sure I gave him a good answers but the questions he asked helped me realize that I really enjoyed programming them and that therefore a computer programmer might be a good career.
The other main thing that he taught me was to distrust the media. He gave some specific examples regarding the IRA and Northern Ireland and how the BBC and the newspapers had exaggerated certain events. He also pointed out that the media had to pick and choose what to report on and that they could prioritize some events over others.
One other thing. Part of his background was (Anglican) Christianity. He might not have gone to church every day, but he certainly did go on Sundays and if the opportunity presented itself he would attend Matins or Evensong. It was just the sort of thing one did. And one behaved accordingly.
- Quote not exact because it was 45 years ago
