Quotulatiousness

June 7, 2026

Are “Dad books” in trouble?

Filed under: Books, Business, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

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

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 29 Oct 2025

This 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

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 2 Dec 2025

Beautifully spiced gingerbread cookies formed in a sea goat mold

City/Region: England | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Time Period: 1773

Christopher 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

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May 25, 2026

Enoch Powell, in person

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

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.

  1. Quote not exact because it was 45 years ago

George Washington “basically started the world’s first global war”

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Ed West talks about a book he had intended to write, but “put it on the back burner” for too long and the moment has passed:

George Washington in the uniform of the Virginia Regiment, 1772.
Portrait by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) from the Washington and Lee University collection via Wikimedia Commons.

The story would start in the 1750s. The first truly world war is in full flow, as Britain and France battle for supremacy of the continent and the oceans. In North America, British colonial troops fight side by side with soldiers from the old country, who mock the bumpkin locals with their ditty “Yankee Doodle“. But, rivalries aside, they both know what they’re fighting for: if Louis XV’s absolute monarchy wins, all their liberties will be gone.

In a heroic battle the British regular and colonial forces take the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne and rename it Fort Pitt, after cabinet minister William Pitt “the elder” – it later becomes Pittsburgh. By 1763 the French are driven out of North America altogether. The British colonies are safe. One officer particularly shines during this war, and diarist Horace Walpole writes how “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire”.

That Virginian was George Washington. Born in Wakefield in Westmoreland County, this British hero was the great-grandson of an Essex clergyman thrown out of the church for drunkenness, and who had landed in that colony in 1657. Washington was an impressive man in every way – standing at 6’2″, with enormous hands and feet and a massive nose, he was notably strong and able to throw objects immense distances (although many of these accounts improved in the telling).

Despite having almost no teeth, like any good British patriot, Washington was very proper about his appearance, insisting on bringing a selection of fine linen shirts even into the backwoods. A conservative by nature and with ambitions to serve as an officer in His Majesty’s forces, he didn’t like the new fashion for shaking hands, preferring the more formal bow.

A major at 21, Washington’s first job was to lead his men into the Ohio Valley to warn away any Frenchmen they found there. The following year, 1754, and now a lieutenant-colonel, he went back and built Fort Necessity close to Fort Duquesne, where he stumbled upon a contingent of enemy troops. They ran for their muskets and Washington ordered his company to fire. Ten Frenchmen were killed, including their lieutenant, and the incident would spark a war in North America between the two great powers, which in 1756 linked up with a Europe-wide conflict later known as the Seven Years’ War. It’s strange to think that, as well as being the first president of a future global superpower, Washington basically started the world’s first global war.

But what if France had won that struggle? Would French-controlled colonies in North America have formed constitutions centred on the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention the often-overlooked right to property? Would they have enshrined religious tolerance or the right to free speech? Trial by jury? Innocence until proven guilty? Hell, no! And if it wasn’t for us, my thesis went, you’d be speaking French.

Without England’s history of Parliamentary freedom, habeas corpus, Magna Carta and the jury system, the colonies would never have developed as they did. Neither would they have the same commercial spirit, downstream of their Puritan and Quaker inheritance.

I think I came up with the proposal after reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, one of the most discussed and popular analyses of American culture. This great work of history and anthropology charts the foundation of the country’s cultural folkways through four migrations – East Anglian Puritans to New England, Cavaliers from England’s south and south-west to Virginia, the mostly northern Quakers to the middle colonies, and Borderers from Ulster to the Appalachians.

I was always very interested in founder effects, whereby colonies come to take on aspects of the mother country which subsequently disappear back home. This is reflected in the fact that many “Americanisms” are actually old English words, like fall, trash and garbage, even “gotten”. It’s also true to some extent of the American accent, developing out of various regional dialects which have since been flattened by the dominance of London. This is especially the case with Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, which apparently is the closest thing to Shakespearean English, although I fear that if I went there this would no longer be true, and they’d all say “like” four times in every sentence and tell you they’re “reaching out”.

May 21, 2026

Enoch Powell, from would-be Viceroy to “Little Englander”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Niccolo Soldo discusses the early career of Enoch Powell and an earlier speech than the famous “Rivers of Blood” speech that took his own party to task for failings in the Imperial decline after World War 2:

AI-generated image from Fisted by Foucault

I’ve been on a bit of an Enoch Powell kick lately, and I’m not exactly sure as to why. Best known for his “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he warned the UK about the dangers of mass migration, Powell was both an iconoclast and an eccentric, something that the British used to produce in spades.

Think about it; as a boy of the age of six, he would finish books and then collect his parents and give them a presentation on what he learned. His teen years were focused on the Classics, and translating(!) them into English. So adept was he at this that by the time he got to Trinity College at Cambridge, he entered into every Classics competition that existed at the time, and won each and every single one during his first year. When the University’s Dean and his wife invited him for a private supper, he had the temerity to politely refuse their offer, insisting that he had work to do (more translations). He became a Professor of Greek at the ripe old age of 25.

A devoted Nietzschean, Powell dreamed of becoming Viceroy of India, and he took the first opportunity to volunteer to serve his country in the war. His rise through the ranks was nothing short of incredible: Lieutenant-Colonel by 1942, and Brigadier (One-Star General) by the end of WW2. The man was the living embodiment of a 19th century German Romantic, albeit an English one at that. So thoroughly English was he that he could barely conceal his anti-Americanism, a trait that would surface from time to time over the course of decades. And yes, English, not British. Although today feted by immigration-restrictionists across the UK, his nationalism was what is known as “Little Englander”. Adding to the eccentricity, the turn away from Empire by the UK shortly after WW2 saw Powell do much the same: from golden dreams of being appointed Viceroy of India, to transforming into a Little Englander, adamant that it protect and retain all of what he felt were its best traits and characteristics, rejecting that which did not conform to this modus operandi.

It’s this overnight transformation that most piques my interest in his character because it is somewhat unique for a person of a very conservative nature to immediately accept such a dramatic shift in conditions and insist that the best must be made of it. “Empire is over. Let’s put it to bed, and let’s get on with it”, are words that are far, far beneath Powell’s level of erudition, but they do accurately describe his course correction.

May 18, 2026

Isoroku Yamamoto – the admiral and the postwar legend

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Big Serge examines the popular memory of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Japan’s early naval war successes against the United States from 1941 onwards, contrasting the postwar image with the man himself:

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet.
Photo from the National Diet Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Japanese leadership in the Second World War enjoys noticeably lower name recognition than their German counterparts. Most people with a cursory knowledge of the war know the core German leadership group around Hitler — Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Speer, and perhaps Heydrich and Bormann — and the all-star lineup of German generals like Rommel, Manstein, and Guderian. In contrast, the only particularly notorious member of Japan’s nebulous leadership group is General Hideki Tojo, who served as Prime Minister for most of the war and became the centerpiece defendant in the postwar trial. As far as Japanese commanders go, the list of name-brand personnel has but a single entry: Isoroku Yamamoto.

Yamamoto’s life and career present a fascinating trajectory that shapes a particular, sympathetic view of the man. A veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, he spent much of his 30’s in the United States, studying at Harvard and serving as naval attache in Japan’s Washington embassy. He therefore had a first hand understanding of America’s industrial depth, and was famously pessimistic about Japan’s prospects in a a war against the United States. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas”, he argued, “knows that Japan lacks the power for a naval race with America”. In one of his more famous and widely recited (though often badly translated) remarks about a war with the United States, he told Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in September 1940:

    If I was told that I had to do it, then you will certainly observe the Navy going all out for half a year to a year. However, I do not hold conviction about the outcome after 2-3 years.

This quote certainly seems remarkably prescient, in light of Japan’s initial wave of operational successes, which slowly faded away as American combat power ramped up. Far more famous still is his remark, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that Japan had “awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with terrible resolve”.

All of this shapes the perception of Yamamoto as a quasi-tragic figure who understood that Japan was unlikely to defeat the United States in the Pacific War, counseled against the conflict, and then dutifully tried to play a losing hand as well as he could once war had been thrust upon him against his own advice. Yamamoto was furthermore a critic of the Japanese Army’s war in China and a particularly vocal opponent of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Japan, lending credence to the idea that he was war-averse.

This is the Yamamoto of American popular memory, and indeed of a great deal of Japanese postwar writing: a sort of samurai Cassandra, too perceptive and cosmopolitan for the militarist regime he served, a man who fired the opening shot of the Pacific War with a heavy heart and no illusions.

It is certainly true that Yamamoto had an appropriately pessimistic assessment of Japan’s prospects in an extended conflict with the United States. What is less often appreciated is that Yamamoto did not, on the basis of this assessment, conclude that Japan ought not to fight. He concluded instead that, if Japan was going to fight, it had to fight differently — with greater boldness, more risk, and an aggressive search for a decisive stroke. He did not spend the eighteen months before Pearl Harbor advocating for peace. He spent them designing what was, on balance, the single most aggressive operational scheme that was possible — and then only barely — within Japan’s kinetic parameters.

This is the critical distinction between Yamamoto-the-man and the Yamamoto of postwar hagiography. He was not a pacifist, reluctant or otherwise. He was a Japanese naval officer of strong patriotic conviction, deeply committed to his service and his nation, who happened to understand the arithmetic of industrial war better than most of his colleagues. Notwithstanding his appreciation for America’s vast industrial base, he shared a broader Japanese disdain for American martial proclivities, dismissing American naval officers as a club of “golfers and bridge players”. His understanding of the United States did not produce pacifism. It produced, rather, a particular kind of operational philosophy — one which held that Japan’s best hope in a war with the United States was to front-load its risk-taking, to achieve a string of dramatic early victories that would either compel American negotiation or, failing that, push the eventual American counter-offensive as far into the future as possible. In either case, the operational prescription was the same: bold, high-risk operations aimed at decisive results.

May 11, 2026

The History of SPI: Part 1 / Simulations Publications Inc. / Wargaming History

Filed under: Business, Gaming, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Legendary Tactics
Published 18 Dec 2025

Remember the golden age of wargaming? This is THE definitive history of SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.), one of the most influential publishers in tabletop gaming. From its groundbreaking magazine Strategy & Tactics to iconic titles like War in the East, StarForce, and Terrible Swift Sword, SPI reshaped what board wargames could be — and built a passionate community along the way.

This is Part 1, where we delve into the origins of SPI and Strategy & Tactics Magazine, and the people and games that were part of it.
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May 9, 2026

Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell, by Simon Heffer

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I think it’s fair to say that Enoch Powell is having a moment, nearly sixty years after he shocked the establishment with his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. He became a pariah even in his own party, and his political career never recovered … but his warnings have more than been fulfilled over the intervening decades. In The Critic, Jeremy Black reviews the recently reprinted 1998 biography of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer:

Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.

The new imprint of this important biography provides an opportunity to reread one of the most skilful works on British political history published over the last half century. As with Heffer’s other books, it is also very well written — although might I offer a plea for leaving aside sentences such as “He still saw no reason to lay off Heath”?

Before turning to the substance, it is worth considering the Foreword. Written this January, it underlines Powell’s significance to many issues, notably: “His deep scepticism about the confluence of America’s interest with those of Britain”. I am, however, dubious about the proposition that “Powell was, quite simply, one of the foremost Conservative thinkers in living memory, possibly the greatest since Burke”. Leaving aside the question of whether Burke can be described as Conservative or even, prior to the 1790s, as conservative, and, separately, the implicit dig at claims for Disraeli whom Heffer is on the record as describing as a Charlatan, I myself would make the case for Salisbury, while agreeing that Macmillan, Hailsham and MacLeod did not measure up to Powell. He returned the damage done him by Macmillan with “bilious” reviews of his Memoirs.

While I am sceptical of the claim that Powell was a great Conservative thinker in the cosmic sense, he was an impressive critic of many of the shibboleths of establishment Conservatism from the 1960s to the 1980s, including on immigration, the nuclear deterrent, the Common Market, the American alliance, Northern Ireland, and economic policy.

A significant aspect of the intellectual character of Powell was the return of this one-time atheist to the Church in the late 1940s, the subject of the “Interlude” “Powell and God” in the book. There is, as Salisbury and Cowling among others underlined, a significant link between Conservatism and the Church of England, and Powell, like Thatcher, can be profitably discussed in these terms, with Thatcher far less convincing.

The discussion of Powell’s elision from public debate is also interesting. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1998, the biography was kept on print-on-demand until cancelled in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. Heffer compares the treatment of Powell to that of Orwell in facing difficulties in publishing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For several years, Heffer found it impossible to persuade a publisher to republish the book and suggests that this was due to a craven fear of public opinion “real or perceived”, one about which Orwell had warned not least when referring to “intellectual cowardice”. The publisher he has found, it has to be said, is another instance of the very valuable work being done by non-metropolitan concerns.

May 4, 2026

QotD: Saint Hillary

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If Michael Kelly can rise from the grave, this will be the week. He’s been summoned.

Kelly was the most relentlessly savage chronicler of the Clinton administration, and of the Clintons personally, but his opening shot was so subtle you had to squint to see what he was doing. In a long feature story that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in May of 1993 under the that’s-not-a-compliment title, “Saint Hillary”, Kelly very quietly mocked Hillary as a preening know-it-all who didn’t know much of anything. He wrote that she represented “the message of the preacher”, with a way of speaking that delivered a stream of moral lectures, as if she had the authority and the wisdom to direct others in the act of moral reconstruction. If you click on the link and read the whole story, you’ll want to watch for the transitional paragraph, the switch from mostly description to mostly derision. It begins with the words, “It is at this point that some awkward questions arise”. Next paragraph: “If it is necessary to remake society, why should Hillary Rodham Clinton get the job?”

It becomes less kind from there. Kelly described a meeting between Hillary Clinton and the progressive Jewish editor and activist Michael Lerner, who (Kelly says) offered a vision of “unintentionally hilarious Big Brotherism”. And then: “The reason Lerner’s proposals for the application of the politics of meaning focus so heavily on bureaucratic irrelevancies is the same reason Mrs. Clinton is struggling still with words”. Self-delusion, unawareness of political realities, hard-headed self-importance, unaware bumbling in an unearned sense of certainty. A moralizer, but not moral, unwise but committed to the appearance of wisdom.

Remember, this story appeared in 1993, in the opening months of the Clinton presidency. Michael Kelly was opening a political era with a dismissal, rolling his eyes at the Clinton project as it began. “Saint Hillary”, they called it. The New York Times used to publish things like this.

Chris Bray, “Saint Hillary the Bluntly Obtuse”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-01-30.

Update, 5 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

May 3, 2026

Useful intellectual idiot case study: Malcolm Caldwell

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Occasionally, Substack suggests a writer or a particular post that its algorithm deems likely to be of interest to me. This post from a few weeks ago by Mark Manson definitely fit the bill. He ranges over a variety of cases starring intellectuals suddenly discovering reality, starting with a particular British useful idiot’s collision with reality:

On December 19th, 1978, Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the University of London boarded a plane to Cambodia for a historic trip. It was an opportunity so rare, so special, that Caldwell genuinely believed it could potentially change the world.

Three days later, Caldwell would die in one of the dumbest ways imaginable.

Malcolm Caldwell was the consummate intellectual. He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development. He had written hundreds of articles and over a dozen books on the subject. He was a professor and researcher at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and was celebrated and supported for his views.

Much of his work dealt with English colonialism in Asia and its dire political consequences. As a result, Caldwell evolved into a staunch Marxist, far to the left of the leftiest leftist who ever lefted.

Just to give you an idea how far left we’re talking, Caldwell visited North Korea in the 1960s and came away saying good things about it. When the Vietnam War started, Caldwell tried to host a fundraiser in London … for the Vietcong.

So when communist revolutionaries took control of Cambodia, Caldwell showed enthusiastic support. The new communist leader of Cambodia was a man by the name of Pol Pot and he had radical new ideas of how to achieve a communist utopia — ideas that had existed in Marxist thought but had yet to actually be attempted in any communist country. Caldwell had been waiting for decades for a communist revolutionary who fully implemented his Marxist dreams. Caldwell came to believe Pol Pot was his man.

Bones recovered from the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s regime killed nearly 2 million people in less than five years.
Image from Mark Manson.

But the truth was that Pol Pot was as insane as he was cruel. And it was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. Upon taking power, Pol Pot nationalized the all land, kicked out or killed all foreigners, and began a sweeping genocide against the educated class. In the four years Pol Pot was in power, it’s estimated that he was responsible for the death of more than 20% of the country’s population.

But when news of the genocide and atrocities began to leak out of Cambodia, Caldwell refused to believe it. He defended Pol Pot’s regime and wrote off the atrocities as simply more western capitalist propaganda. His unwavering support eventually earned him an exclusive invitation to visit Cambodia by Pol Pot’s government. Caldwell accepted. And in December of 1978, he boarded that fateful flight to Asia.

Once there, Caldwell toured the country. He met the leadership and learned about their policies firsthand. But the climax of his trip was the last evening — a private audience with Pol Pot himself. Reportedly, Caldwell was “euphoric” with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for the Cambodian regime. He began to offer feedback and dare I say, potentially even a little criticism. Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night.

Malcolm Caldwell is what I like to refer to as an intelligent idiot. A man with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and understanding, a world-class mind with powerful thoughts, and yet absolutely no idea how to apply any of it.

April 25, 2026

QotD: Goethe, the lost German master

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This was the atmosphere in which I discovered Germany. It was a minor act of defiance to choose German instead of Latin for O-level, but with hindsight I was extremely fortunate to have the choice. There were two German teachers in my grammar school of just 600 pupils. Today, even the best state schools seldom offer the subject; not one of our four children has had the opportunity that I had to study German language and, especially, literature up to the high standard that was then expected at A-level.

Today, the texts are almost all recent and appear to be chosen partly with the film of the book in mind. In particular, Goethe has disappeared from the syllabus, presumably because the language is considered too archaic. Yet I recall the immense pleasure and satisfaction of mastering a Goethe play — Egmont. The story of the dashing Dutchman and his martial defiance of the sinister Duke of Alba, the courage of his beloved, Klärchen, who fantasises in song about how wonderful it would be to be a man and fight the Spaniards — “ein Glück sondergleichen ein Mannsbild zu sein“. Somehow I even obtained an LP of Beethoven’s incidental music for Egmont: seldom heard apart from the overture, but brilliantly evoking the grandeur of the drama.

Like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe belongs not just to German literature, but to world literature, Weltliteratur — a term he coined. I am told that even in German Gymnasien, Goethe is little studied now. He is certainly a rare bird in English schools — or even universities. It is tragic that educated people, including students of literature, so seldom encounter the greatest of Germans even in translation. We might get on better with Germany if we did.

Daniel Johnson, “How I discovered Germany”, The Critic, 2020-08-02.

April 23, 2026

Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 1 Oct 2025

The first of this year’s video’s in answer to viewers’ questions — today we think about and compare Alexander and Caesar. This is not new, for in the ancient world the pair were often connected, even though they lived centuries apart. Appian compared and contrasted them, Plutarch paired his biographies of them, while Suetonius and others told stories about Caesar’s admiration for the famous Macedonian.

April 21, 2026

Ivan the Terrible – Feeding the Evil Russian Tsar

Filed under: Food, History, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Oct 2025

Soft buns filled with cabbage, onion and dill

City/Region: Russia
Time Period: 16th Century

In Russian, Ivan the Terrible is Ivan Grozny, and the translation of “terrible” was meant more in the way of “fearsome” or “formidable” rather than “cruel” or “awful”, though Ivan ended up being all of those. What started off as a good reign with military victories, building Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and restricting the boyars‘ (aristocracy) power over the people descended into a reign of terror with a secret police, the massacre of a city, and even killing his eldest son in a fit of rage.

While Ivan truly was terrible, these piroshki are not. They are absolutely delicious. The bread is soft, and the filling is savory and slightly sweet with the dill really coming through. These were made with all different kinds of fillings, so feel free to try out other ingredients, like meat, fish, fruit, or other vegetables, or put in a hard boiled egg for a modern touch.

    Small pies filled with mushrooms, poppy seeds, kasha, turnips, cabbage, or whatever else God sends.
    When the servants bake bread, order them to set some of the dough aside, to be stuffed for piroshki.

    — The Domostroi, 16th Century

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April 14, 2026

Caligula – Feeding Rome’s Most Evil Emperor

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Oct 2025

Skin-on marinated and roasted pork belly decorated with edible gold paint

City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st Century

Caligula, the third Roman Emperor, is remembered as one of the most notorious and cruel of the lot. While he tortured and killed whomever he pleased, he also threw lavish banquets. Suetonius writes that Caligula’s reckless extravagance included “loaves and meats of gold”, and while it’s possible that he meant loaves and meats made of actual gold, I’m going with an edible interpretation.

The Roman flavors of garum, asafoetida, and other seasonings come through strongly, but aren’t overpowering. The meat is wonderfully crispy while being meltingly tender, and the sauce is a nice sweet counterpoint. The gilding is, of course, optional, but it does look rather impressive.

As always, feel free to change up the amounts of anything in the marinade and sauce to suit your tastes as Apicius doesn’t give us any amounts to go on; your version will be just as authentic as this one.

    Offelas Ostienses
    You slice the meat beneath the skin, so that the skin remains intact. Grind pepper, lovage, dill, cumin, silphium, and one bay laurel berry; moisten with liquamen (garum), pound. Pour over the meat pieces in a roasting pan. When they have marinated for two or three days, take them out, tie them crosswise and put them into an oven. When cooked, separate each piece, and grind pepper and lovage; moisten with liquamen, and add a little passum so that it is sweet. When it comes to a boil, thicken the sauce with starch, pour over the meat pieces and serve.
    — De re coquinaria by Apicius, 1st century

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