The Romans had no doubt who their greatest intellectual was — the astonishing polymath Marcus Terentius Varro
Yes, the clever Romans did plenty for us, but just who was the cleverest of them all? A tricky question, to be sure, but the Romans were confident about their own answer. The doctissimus was Varro — a man who wrote 620 books, and really is one of the most impressive polymaths that people have never heard of.
Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) was born in the Sabine town of Reate (Rieti) but found his proper education in Rome. There he studied under Lucius Aelius Stilo, the Stoic grammarian and antiquarian, who can perhaps be called the first bona fide scholar of Roman descent. Later he spent time in Athens under Antiochus of Ascalon, the celebrated Platonist and reformer of the Academy. Both proved to be major influences on the intellectual scene of first-century BC Rome (Cicero also studied with both).
[…]
What built Varro’s enduring reputation was his writing. His volume of work remains truly staggering. As Augustine observed, “Varro read so much that we are amazed he had any spare time to write; but he wrote so much that we can scarcely believe he could have read anything”. His output exceeded every other Roman writer, and was scarcely equalled by any Greek writer except Callimachus. He is said to have written 490 books by the time he was 77, which would mean that, in his last twelve years, he wrote almost a book per month. No surprise that he was rumoured to have died with pen in hand.
The sheer breadth of his learning was also astounding: he wrote on the full gamut of human knowledge (with the possible exceptions of medicine and advanced mathematics): the history of Rome, its civilisation, its customs and its people, civil law, Roman literature and drama, philosophy, grammar, the history of libraries, linguistics, tidal motion, sea navigation, Greco-Roman biography, as well as a three-book account of his own life.
But we must now the bad news: over 95 per cent of Varro’s writings do not survive to us, and of over 70 separate works authored by him only one – a three-book treatise on farming (De Re Rustica) – survives in a complete state. Mercifully, we are also able to read several extant books of his fascinating treatise on the Latin language (De Lingua Latina), a work that shows such fervour for its subject that the author completely forgot about his own Latin style.
Varro’s prodigious life-span for a Roman — of ninety years — allowed him to be born ten years before Cicero and outlive him by sixteen. This gave him an unparalleled perspective of the rapidly changing social, political and intellectual narrative of the late-second and first centuries BC. No-one had seen more and learned more than this self-driven scholar.
Although Cicero regarded him as an “amazingly odd” character (mirabiliter moratus), he did bestow lavish praise on Varro for the remarkable contribution of his 41-book Antiquitates: Romans previously wandered around like strangers in a city which seemed alien and confused; but Varro’s rich researches shed new light on the capital, whose reflection in turn revealed to them their own true identity. Cicero’s private letters reveal that he worried greatly about what Varro thought of him: that fact alone is proof that, in the ancient respublica litterarum, Varro really was the apex predator.
David Butterfield, “Varro and wide”, The Critic, 2026-07-21.
October 29, 2026
QotD: The Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro
October 27, 2026
Odd Man Out | A Film Portrait of Enoch Powell (1995)
Eugenus Rex
Published 6 Jun 2021In an insightful and sobering documentary, journalist Michael Cockerell chronicles the life and career of the politician, classical scholar, linguist, soldier, poet and altogether self-identifying outcast; the Right Honourable Brigadier John Enoch Powell. Featuring interviews with Mr. Powell, his family, friends and the former Prime Minister, the Baroness Thatcher.
Originally broadcast: 11th November, 1995.
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October 24, 2026
Everyone has an opinion on Oliver Cromwell
On Substack, Charles Haywood reviews The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton:
If you know anything about Oliver Cromwell — and few do nowadays — you probably have an opinion about the man. Some vilify him; “A curse upon you, Oliver Cromwell, you who raped our Motherland”, the Irish rock band The Pogues sang. Others praise him as an enemy of arbitrary rule and a proto-republican. Ronald Hutton’s new biography of Cromwell’s early life and his climb to prominence makes no final judgment on the man, but it does offer a nuanced view of this complex historical figure. From Hutton’s excellent book we get not just history but the realization, in this desiccated age, that men such as Cromwell always emerge during great turmoil, rising as if from sown dragon’s teeth.
Hutton wisely focuses on his subject, and makes no attempt to tease out the political and social complexities behind the Civil War. He expertly evokes the England of the mid-seventeenth century, both in politics and the natural world. As to the latter, quite often Hutton describes in detail the flora of the region and season, at the same time he narrates a particular historical event, which makes the reader feel more immersed in the story, as if he were there. It also makes the reader a little sad, though. Why? Because it brings to the mind’s eye a lost time and a lost country, before industrialization, liquid modernity, and alien invitees destroyed both the English landscape and England’s ancient culture.
The short version of Hutton’s biography is that Cromwell “was both godly and wily, and the two at times seem to jar with each other”. No doubt this is often true for a godly man called to be a temporal leader. Hutton believes that most Cromwell biographers focus too much on the godliness and too little on the wiliness. This is not really a popular history; it offers extensive notes, and Hutton often refers to controversies among Cromwell scholars of little interest to the casual reader. Nonetheless, it is very readable, so any reader who is willing to put in a little effort will be rewarded.
Until he was forty, Cromwell lived as an obscure provincial, a collateral descendant of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s minister who fell from grace. In his thirties, however, he became a devout Puritan, something about which we know very little. (He kept no archive of correspondence, and while he left voluminous public words, he left no record of his own private thoughts other than letters to others.) Hutton fleshes out what we can know about Cromwell’s life prior to 1640, in the East Midlands, in and near Huntingdon. There was no reason to expect great things from Cromwell; he was on the lower border of the gentry, a man of no importance. In fact, for a time until he inherited money from his uncle, he directly worked the land as a tenant farmer.
[…]
For the next two years, relations between Parliament and King deteriorated, and the countryside began to separate into armed factions. When Charles sought to fund himself by asking for donations from Cambridge colleges, Cromwell returned to Cambridge, apparently on his own initiative, and raised a militia, successfully preventing the dispatch of gold and silver to the King. Soon he was formally commissioned a cavalry officer in the army being raised by Parliament, and so he remained for the entire war, rising ever higher in rank.
From 1642 until 1646, the end of the period covered by Hutton’s book, Cromwell alternated vigorous military activity with political activity. He remained a member of Parliament. In 1645 Parliament, in order to resolve a dispute between the Lords and Commons, forbade members to also be military officers. Such a separation was part of creating the famous New Model Army—but Cromwell alone was given a dispensation. This was meant to be very temporary, meeting an immediate critical need, not an acclamation of Cromwell, who had made plenty of internal enemies. But as it happens, Cromwell’s greatest military successes immediately followed, at the most crucial period of this first phase of the Civil War, and so he continued to both lead soldiers and serve in Parliament. This lucky confluence of events was what ultimately made Cromwell.
QotD: Was Hitler stupid?
Hitler didn’t have that problem. It’s a mug’s game, trying to tie “measured IQ” to anything, much less to try to retroactively guess any given historical figure’s IQ. But it’s a useful-ish concept, so let’s call that “processor speed”. My buddy Jeremy was right at the apex of the bell curve re: processor speed. Hitler was clearly on the right hand side of that particular curve. Probably a fair ways out there, if the truth be known — no genius, Hitler, but pretty sharp nonetheless.
Unfortunately, that degree of smart makes one especially vulnerable to a certain kind of stupidity — let’s call it “the stupidity of misplaced self-esteem”. Snowflake stupid, maybe, for short. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of being the smartest guy in the room. I mean clearly, unquestionably the sharpest knife in that particular drawer. If you have too many experiences like that, you start thinking you’re the sharpest knife in every drawer; the smartest guy in any possible room. Which means you veer out of your lane on the regular.
It’s endemic in academia, so I’m particularly sensitive to that kind of stupidity. Most profs actually are fairly bright, processor speed-wise. […] If he’d used those brains to, say, open up a mechanic shop or something, he’d fall victim to Big Man Syndrome — every babymomma’s cousin’s sister’s former roommate would start coming around, expecting him to pimp her ride for free. Since academia produces nothing useful, the homies can’t freeride on you).
Throw in the fact that you control the grade book, and it’s really, really easy to convince yourself you’re the smartest guy in any room. With no one to hold you in check, and in the absence of reality testing — which the entire ivory tower ecosystem is designed to avoid — it’s sometimes a real battle not to let your freak flag fly. Indeed you frequently come to wonder why you bother …
… and that’s the kind of stupid Hitler was. Snowflake stupidity is, obviously, situational. There were lots of legit very smart guys in the Nazi party. I doubt Hitler was ever the processor-speed smartest guy in any room, but he was up there, and in the early days he knew it — both ways. Moreover, he had charisma. What the PUAs study like crazy to learn, he just naturally knew how to do. Even the people who were constitutionally immune to his charm could see how and why so many others fell for it.
That’s the most dangerous combo. He was smart enough to be right in there in most rooms … but he could dominate any room with his charisma. Which leads to another special kind of stupidity, what you might call “messianic stupidity”. Things just kind of work out for that kind of guy; have you noticed? I’m sure everyone has known someone like that — probably not to Hitler’s degree, but I’m sure there’s someone in your life that just seems to catch every possible break, all the time, and when something does start going south for him, he can just turn on those baby blues and it all kinda just … goes away.
That kind of person — and I had a buddy like this; I saw it at close range — “knows better”. In the sense that if you gave him a situation on paper, and had him dope it out Heuer-style, he’d come up with the “correct” choice. Nothing wrong with his decision making process in a vacuum, and of course he was smarter than the average bear, too. If you went to Ross with a problem and pitched it as something that might hypothetically happen to some guy, he’d give you solid to excellent advice.
If, however, you went to him with one of your problems, in a situation involving mutual acquaintances, his advice would be terrible. For instance, he was one of those guys who don’t look like anything special, but every girl in the room starts drooling when he walks in. So you ask him “Hey, what should I do about Jane?” and though he’ll try his best to help, it really just doesn’t compute. Because while whatever he advises would work out great for him — of course it would — for you it’ll be a big mess, even if you do your very best Ross impersonation, because you don’t have that thing he has, the one the Germans call je ne sais quoi.
Hitler did. His successes were due, in large part, to doing zany, completely off-the-wall shit, the kind no rational planner would ever even bother planning against. Which can work out spectacularly well — Joan of Arc had the same gift. Lenin did, too. Combine that with the devil’s own luck (at least initially) and you get the mystique of the messianic leader. He does zany stuff, and it just kinda works out … until it doesn’t.
Combine that with ideological stupidity and you’re bound to have tears before bedtime. The Nazis had absolutely no idea what they were going to do with Grossdeutschland. Not the first clue. There’s a wonderful book on this, by Mark Mazower, called Hitler’s Empire. To say “they had no clue” is actually an understatement. His thesis, which I agree with, is that Hitler — being a 19th century guy — thought of the conquered territories in terms of Germany’s lost colonies in Africa. Really. A kind of Bismarckian Weltpolitik, except in France instead of Tanzania.
That’s just dumb. It’s not processor-speed dumb; it’s a lifetime of mental habit dumb, combined with ideological enstupidation. Add to this Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, which is buried in my to-read pile somewhere, but you can find good reviews on it with a little googling. Is that IQ-dumb? No. Is it really fucking stupid? Oh yeah.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-12.
October 23, 2026
The Praetorian enforcer for Tiberius Caesar
In Quillette, an excerpt from Guy de la Bédoyère’s new book, Brief Lives of the Ancient World: Rulers, Rebels, and Robbers, on Sejanus, Praetorian Prefect for much of the reign of Tiberius Caesar:
The story of Sejanus is dependent on the accounts of Roman historians, in particular Tacitus, who indulged himself with an unforgettable tale of treachery and dissimulation. His main purpose was to portray Tiberius as a sinister and manipulative tyrant, but he also succeeded in creating an allegory of cynicism at the heart of power.
Shortly after Tiberius’ accession in AD 14, the son of praetorian prefect Seius Strabo — Lucius Aelius Sejanus (born Lucius Seius) — was appointed co-prefect. Like his father, he was an equestrian, Rome’s second aristocratic tier, but had been adopted into the senatorial Aelii clan, hence his name change.
The adoption entitled Sejanus to a senatorial career, but he must have decided that the prefecture of the Praetorian Guard offered him more real power and personal access to the emperor. It also allowed him to avoid the suspicion that surrounded ambitious senators. Tiberius chose a few trusted equestrians to form part of his most intimate circle.
Within a year, Sejanus held the position on his own when his father was promoted to the prefecture of Egypt. Enjoying a trusted pedigree, he quickly inveigled himself into Tiberius’ favour. Sejanus was the first of the praetorian prefects to experiment with the power and influence the position enjoyed, and thereby also with the potential power of the guard as a political force.
Detail from the Praetorian Relief, a Roman marble relief dated to c. 51–52 AD from the Arch of Claudius in Rome.
Sejanus was helped by chance, so often the principal agent in realising ambition. The huge theatre that had been built in Rome by Pompey Magnus in 55 BC burst into flames in the year AD 22. The fire was contained thanks to quick work by Sejanus, who used his position to tackle the emergency. Tiberius heaped praise on Sejanus for averting a catastrophe. The senate voted that a statue of Sejanus be erected on the grounds of the theatre.
In time, the career of Sejanus would expose how dangerous the commander of the guard could become. Tiberius ignored the signs, preferring to take as little interest as possible in the job of being emperor.
Sejanus made his first significant move in AD 23 when he installed all the praetorian cohorts in the Castra Praetoria, a fortified military camp in the northeastern part of the city. Under Augustus, they had been based at several locations in Italy, safely dispersed away from Rome, but may have already been brought into various barracks around the city under Tiberius. Their new dedicated fortress transformed the significance of the prefecture of the guard. The Castra Praetoria, which would remain a permanent feature until the guard’s disbandment under Constantine almost three centuries later, meant that the men were now directly and immediately under Sejanus’ control.
October 16, 2026
QotD: Niccolao Manucci as a “player character” in history
How do I know that? Well let’s return to the teenage Venetian, suddenly orphaned of his foster father: “I was left alone, sad and anxious, having nothing to console me, nor anywhere to turn in order to recover my things”. Then things go from bad to worse: two other Europeans show up and steal the rest of Manucci’s stuff and coerce him into traveling with them to Delhi. But then somehow the young man scores an interview with the king’s vizier and, using the bits of Persian he picked up along the journey, convinces him to arrest the men who’d tried to abduct him. He parlays the vizier’s friendship into a royal audience, and thence into an offer of employment from the crown prince. In a short while, Manucci is a courtier hanging around the palace in fine clothes paid for by the state, getting tutored in Indian languages and Mughal history and correct deportment. He tells us that the only difficulty in his life was the need to constantly scheme in order to avoid being forcibly converted to Islam, and then interrupts his own narration to give us a few hundred pages of ancient Mughal history.
Are you rolling your eyes yet? Every bit of this story so far, starting from the moment he snuck onto that ship, is literally unbelievable. Irvine certainly seemed to feel that way, if his footnotes and interjections are anything to go by. He evidently flung himself into a centuries-later posthumous cross-examination, looking for any detail in Manucci’s narrative that’s out of place. He doesn’t find any. Worse, he finds numerous corroborating accounts in other contemporaneous sources. But if this story actually happened, then we are left with a nasty trichotomy. One of three things must be true: (1) Manucci is the luckiest sonofabitch alive. (2) Manucci has superhuman powers of persuasion. (3) Manucci is leaving out something important. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a little bit of all three, because Manucci is a player character.
They walk among us. Lately the preferred jargon term has been “agency”. Before that people called them “live players”. In the old days they were referred to as “great men”, but that one’s my least favorite of the descriptors because it implies that they have to be like Cyrus the Great or Napoleon, when in reality they’re often much harder to spot. That’s because, as Samo Burja notes, player characters often deliberately cloak themselves in order to avoid detection by other player characters. These ones you may only notice by their aftereffects, like the lingering gravitational distortion after a singularity has whizzed by, reality warping as they knife through to their destination and then reconstituting itself behind them.
Humanity’s great sages have long known that every so often the planets are in a particular configuration, and a Child of Destiny is born. The real question is why. The fun-ruiners will note that in a world of billions of people, some of them are just going to be 6σ lucky. It is difficult for us even to conceive what it means to be 6σ lucky, and yet, like some bizarre object conjured by a non-constructive mathematical proof, we know such people are out there, somewhere in the wave function. But let’s not be fun-ruiners for a moment and consider the other possibilities. Maybe these individuals are chosen by God, or the gods. Or maybe they are the ones paying for the simulation, and therefore have access to the root login. Whatever their source, they exist. Often they spend part of their lives unaware of their true nature. And then … they awaken.
There was a little while when “NPC” was getting thrown around as a term of abuse, but as I have explained at some length,1 there’s nothing wrong with being an NPC. We come by it honestly. At some point, in the Springtime of your life, you bumped up against the universe, you pushed the boundaries, you pushed your limits. On that day, the universe pushed back. Hard. You learned your lesson, like a little kid who touched a hot stove. NPCs are formed from scar tissue, a fibrous mass of tough lessons about the nature of the world. But, as we have just deduced, there must exist people who, whether by divine ordinance or fluke of probability, had a very different experience on that fateful day. They pushed against the universe, and the universe gave in and gave them everything they wanted. And what lesson does that impart? Something like: “Rules are for the sheep, but you can hack the matrix and get what you want”. Now they are awakened. And the crazy thing is that if you keep getting lucky, not 6σ lucky, but just on-a-roll lucky, the awakened state can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some parts of the world really can be hacked with a little luck and a lot of determination. So there’s a feedback loop that can rapidly amplify mere one-in-a-billion luck into miraculous, reality-altering luck. That’s my attempt at a purely naturalistic explanation of player characters. Or maybe they’re just chosen by God.
Manucci is a slippery one. I only caught him because I read the first part of this book twice: once when I was reading it through casually, and then again as I sat down to write this review and tried to figure out how the hell to convey all this. Again, as with a Gene Wolfe novel, to understand the beginning you must have read the ending. In all the thousands of pages of narration, the one subject Manucci barely touches on is himself. That’s because Manucci is a player character practicing very high-level obfuscation techniques. This sort of misdirection is also the hallmark of a con-man, and what do you know: there is one brief, brief moment when Manucci gets a little too sure of himself and lets slip that he actually was functioning as a super-effective con-man back there in 17th century India. He wove his web of shadows around the Mughal aristocracy, and then he nearly got it around us the readers as well.
So we finally have Manucci pinned down: he is the subtype of player character known as a “guile hero“. You know them from stories: Odysseus, or Locke Lamora, or almost every character played by Kevin Spacey. Manucci is like them, his character class is either rogue or bard.2 At what age was he awakened? Was he already aware of his powers when he crept down that Venetian dock? And what really happened between him and Bellomont? Did he seduce the English gentleman? Or did he suss out his mission and blackmail him with a threat to make it public? Or did he just turn the full force of his personality on the hopeless cavalier and get 6σ lucky on his CHA roll? We shall never know. But if you are asking questions like these, then you now have the correct interpretive lens for what follows.3
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-09-08.
- Twice!
- This is a totally OP and broken build, since as a Venetian he already gets a racial bonus to DEX and CHA.
- And you’re one step ahead of Irvine, who as far as I can tell never figured it out.
October 13, 2026
QotD: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wokester avant la lettre
1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.
2. The “Noble Savage” is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.
3. The “General Will” is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were “properly enlightened”. Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation.
4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every “liberation” movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.
5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.
6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda [hypocrisy] (remember the obłuda of communism👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.
7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.
Krzysztof Szczawinski, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-10. (Auto-translated from the original Polish by X)
October 2, 2026
Britain’s best general in World War II
If you’ve been following for a while, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Field Marshal Bill Slim, the best but also least well known British general of the Second World War. His achievements in Burma and India are overshadowed in popular memory by the struggle against the Nazis in Europe and the vast Pacific campaigns against the Japanese by primarily American forces. In recent years, there’s been a bit more attention paid to the XIV Army’s long and bitter fight, but there’s always more to discover about that incredible struggle:
Field Marshal Sir William Slim (1891-1970), during his time as GOC XIVth Army.
Portrait by No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons.
But I see him clear, with that robber-baron face under the Gurkha hat … looking like a rather scruffy private with a general’s tab — which of course is what he was.
– one of General Slim’s soldiers remembers
A search on Amazon using the term “military memoir” yields more than forty thousand results. With so many choices, why read Field Marshal William Slim’s World War II memoir entitled Defeat into Victory? Interestingly enough, there are two answers. The short answer was revealed in 2011 when the National Army Museum in London held a debate and a public poll to answer the question — Who is Britain’s greatest general? Great Britain, of course, has a long and distinguished military history with a great many famous military commanders who could all vie for this honor. In what turned out to be a surprise to many, Field Marshal Slim tied with the Duke of Wellington as the winner. So, if you are considering whether to read Slim’s memoir, ask yourself — how much do you know about someone who might be one of the greatest generals in history?
Before continuing this essay with a longer, more structured answer about the value of Slim’s memoir, a few words about William Slim himself. He began his military career as a temporary lieutenant at the beginning of World War I, without the benefit of a university education or Sandhurst training. By the end of World War I, he had achieved a sterling military record — wounded twice, awarded the Military Cross and temporarily promoted to major. He spent the inter-war years assigned to the Indian Army and was notably associated with the 6th and 7th Gurkha Rifles. At the beginning of World War II, he was given brigade command in East Africa and then command of the 10th Indian Division in the Middle East. His memoir begins in early 1942 when Slim is suddenly and unexpectedly told to leave his command and report immediately to Army Headquarters in India. The summons was so abrupt that Slim thought he was being relieved of command. He didn’t know it at the time but he was about to spend the rest of the war in India and Burma.
A distinct three-act narrative arc forms the structure of his book. In Act I (1942), Slim takes command of Burma Corps. This was an ad hoc two-division force that was in the middle of conducting a fighting retreat while being overwhelmed by the surging Japanese Army. Slim and his men end up suffering through a one hundred day, nine-hundred-mile retreat back to India in what historians have called the longest retreat ever conducted by a British army. By May 1942, the remnants of his Corps finally reached safe haven in India.
In Act II (1943), Slim regroups, retrains and resupplies his forces in preparation for his reconquest of Burma. This was not as straightforward a task as it sounds. Slim now commands the Fourteenth Army which, at its height, consisted of nearly one million soldiers and was one of the largest armies in the world. But the size of the Fourteenth Army was not as striking as the diversity of its composition. Slim had to make a disciplined, cohesive and effective fighting force using regiments from England, Scotland, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and a vast array of Indian units including Sikhs, Rajputs, Pathans and Gurkhas from Nepal. Later in the war, Slim described a routine tactical operation: “The Japanese had for some time been harassing 28 East African Brigade Group … and a Punjabi battalion had been sent in to stiffen it”. The Japanese counterattacked “and a British battalion was hurriedly transferred from the east bank and joined them”. One routine tactical operation — involving allied soldiers from three continents.
In Act III, (1944-45), Slim and his army return to Burma and achieve triumph after triumph. The first triumph is the battle of Imphal (March-July 1944). The famed novelist George MacDonald Fraser was a young Scottish soldier in Slim’s Fourteenth Army and he later wrote; “I imagine that every teenager today has heard of Stalingrad and Alamein and D-Day but I wonder how many know the name of Imphal … where Japan suffered the greatest catastrophe in its military history”. The subsequent battle of Meiktila (February- March 1945) was equally significant and has been characterized by British military historian Corelli Barnett as, “the cleverest, boldest and most brilliant single British victory in World War II”. By mid-1945, Slim’s victorious Fourteenth Army had retaken Rangoon and destroyed the Japanese army in Burma.
There are three dimensions to Slim’s memoir that make it so memorable. It is a tale well-written, it is a tale of wonder and it is a tale filled with wisdom.
September 17, 2026
QotD: Boris Johnson
How can this possibly have happened to the land of Magna Carta and English Common Law, the heroic seafaring nation which coloured the atlas pink and stamped its character on half the world’s nations from Australia and the U.S. to India and South Africa, that invented most of the world’s best sports, produced most of its greatest literature, beat Philip II of Spain, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler and discovered almost everything worth discovering?
Just when did Britain become so incredibly, embarrassingly shit?
Well, it’s easy to blame Boris, as I have done on occasion, for being a priapic lard-butted lightweight chancer who should never have been given the keys to Number 10. As we’ve learned to our cost, he’s all mouth and no trousers, great for an impromptu bon mot or jolly photo op but perfectly useless in times of crisis, being too easily led, having no opinions of his own, the backbone of sponge and the moral character of a Plecostomus catfish.
James Delingpole, “Britain is now the sick man of Europe”, Breitbart, 2020-08-14.
September 14, 2026
George Orwell according to family and friends – Writers & Wordsmiths
BBC Archive
Published 21 Mar 2026This programme contains attitudes of its time.
Recollections of George Orwell by his wife Sonia Orwell, sister Avril Dunn, and friends Malcolm Muggeridge and Cyril Connolly. [Original billing]
“From early in his writing career, Eric Blair adopted the nom de plume, which he is now universally known. He became George Orwell. In his will, he emphatically directed that no biography of him should be written. And to insure his wishes were respected, effectively covered up his traces. Blair hid behind Orwell.”
The man behind Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and The Road to Wigan Pier was elusive, but in this programme family and friends share memories of the influential author.
Clip taken from George Orwell: 1903-1950, originally broadcast on 20 November, 1965.
September 12, 2026
How the Roman Republic Collapsed Into Civil War
Who was Gaius Marius’ son, and how did he set out to bring down his father’s rival, Sulla? Which two rising stars in Sulla’s faction, Crassus and Pompey, would go on to bring down the Republic, with Julius Caesar? And, how did a momentous battle in the East see Sulla elevated to the master of Rome?
Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the climactic conclusion to the remarkable rise of one of Rome’s greatest generals: Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a man who would destroy his rivals, win victories in the east, and ruthlessly change the destiny of the Roman Republic forever.
0:00 The Roman Republic Implodes
0:40 Sulla’s Return
3:05 Cinna and the Marians
8:03 Cinna’s Disastrous Plan
12:20 Sulla’s Enemies Collapse
14:07 Crassus Joins Sulla
17:01 The Rise of Pompey
21:16 Marius the Younger
24:13 The Marian Cause Collapses
25:03 The Samnites March on Rome
26:03 The Battle of the Colline Gate
28:45 Anthropic
29:57 Sulla Takes Control of Rome
35:05 The Proscriptions Begin
41:18 The End of the Marians
42:41 Pompey the “Teenage Butcher”
44:20 Pompey Demands a Triumph
47:28 Sulla’s Great Paradox
48:02 Sulla Becomes Dictator
51:27 Rebuilding the Republic
54:00 Sulla Gives Up Power
55:30 Sulla’s Wild Retirement
58:42 The Death of Sulla
59:58 Did Sulla Doom the Republic?
1:01:54 Why Didn’t Sulla Become Emperor?
1:02:46 Julius Caesar Learns from Sulla
1:04:01 Cicero Bonus Episode
September 8, 2026
Sulla Seized Rome… Then Marius Returned for Revenge | Rome’s First Civil War
The Rest Is History
Published 7 Sep 2026What shocking, unprecedented act did Sulla commit with his legions after having his ambitions frustrated once more by his bitter rival, the tribune Marius? How did Marius escape capture and death? And, would Marius retaliate …?
Join Tom and Dominic as they unfold the mounting rivalry between two Roman generals — Marius and Sulla — as they battle for ultimate control of the empire, and Sulla takes a fateful step that will change the fate of the Republic forever …
0:00 Sulla: The First Roman General to March on Rome
4:31 Marius Seizes Sulla’s Command
11:47 Sulla Marches on Rome
19:50 Mithridates: Rome’s Great Enemy in the East
23:25 The Massacre of the Romans in Asia
26:46 Athens Revolts Against Rome
30:34 Rome’s Generals Become Warlords
34:38 Pressure
35:46 Marius: Fugitive and Outlaw
41:02 Rome Descends Into Political Violence
45:13 Marius Raises a Private Army
48:15 Marius Returns to Rome
49:06 Marius’s Seventh Consulship and Death
51:44 Sulla Goes to War in Greece
53:40 The Siege of Athens
56:59 Sulla Storms Athens
59:51 Sulla Faces Mithridates’ Army
1:00:48 Sulla Makes Peace with Mithridates
1:03:33 Sulla’s Revenge on Athens
1:04:58 Rome’s First Civil War Looms
September 5, 2026
QotD: The first (of many) near-death experiences of William Marshal, the greatest knight
He would have been far from the first child to die on Stephen’s account, because at this point England was fourteen years into a civil war so brutal that the Peterborough Chronicle recorded that men “said openly that Christ slept” (þa sæden openlice ðæt Crist slep. ⁊ his halechen),1 but this time was different. This time, the king had to order the boy’s death himself.
The medieval English royal succession was never as neat as Crusader Kings mechanics would have you believe, but even so Stephen I (and only) was an unlikely king. His mother Adela was the youngest child of William the Conqueror. She had four older brothers, three of whom survived their father, and Stephen himself was the third of her sons. But the Conqueror’s eldest son, Robert Curthose, mortgaged his duchy of Normandy to fund his participation in the First Crusade and would go on to spend the decades after his return in comfortable captivity. His second son, Richard, was killed as a teenager in a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1070, and his third son, William Rufus, succeeded him as king, never married, and was also killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest (this time in 1100). If this seems suspiciously convenient, it was: the youngest brother, Henry, was also on the fatal hunting trip. He immediately rode hard for Winchester, where he was crowned three days later.
Henry I promptly married Matilda, whose father was the king of Scotland and whose mother Margaret (later canonized by Innocent IV) was the sister of Edgar Ætheling: Henry and Matilda’s son William, born in 1103, united the blood of the Norman conquerors and the old Anglo-Saxon House of Wessex. Their daughter, another Matilda, was sent off to Germany at the age of eight to marry the twenty four-year-old Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. And that was it: Henry I also fathered at least twenty-two attested bastards, but William and Matilda were his only legitimate children. Which meant that when a drunken helmsman wrecked the ship carrying William and at least three hundred other flowers of the Anglo-Norman nobility across the Channel, Henry was in deep trouble. Luckily for him, his daughter soon returned from Germany a childless widow and once he had remarried her to Geoffrey of Anjou he was able to browbeat his barons into accepting her as his heir. Unluckily for him, they didn’t mean it: Empress Matilda was deeply unpopular even beyond the fact that she was a woman, and as soon as Henry died they were happy to crown his nephew Stephen instead.
The ensuing civil war, known to history as “the Anarchy,” was exciting and dramatic and featured such moments as a king captured on the battlefield, a queen climbing out the window of a besieged castle and escaping through a snowstorm, and a teenage boy invading England with a mercenary army he couldn’t afford to pay. For our purposes, though, all you really need to know is that in 1152 Stephen laid siege to a castle in Berkshire that John Marshal, a supporter of Matilda, had built without royal authorization. (These are apparently called “adulterine castles“, which I think is delightful.) Marshal asked for a truce to consult with his constable and organize the garrison’s surrender and offered his youngest son William as a hostage for his good behavior. Stephen accepted, took the boy into his camp, and withdrew to let Marshal enter with his men.
And then John Marshal stayed in the newly-reinforced castle instead.
Using your children as diplomatic hostages was standard practice in this era. Abandoning them to be executed as punishment for your bad faith was definitely not. But when Stephen’s men told John Marshal that his son’s life would be forfeit for his treachery, Marshal is said to have replied that he didn’t care, because he still had “the anvils and the hammers to forge even finer ones”. Stephen was not, in the end, able to bring himself to kill young William: the story has it that he lost his nerve when the boy asked on his way to the gallows whether he could play with a guard’s spear “afterwards”, and then again when William happily climbed into the catapult they planned to use to send him over the walls to his father (he thought it was a swing). He did, however, remain a hostage in Stephen’s camp until the end of the war a year later.2
Our only source for this story of William’s childhood, and for most of the truly excellent stories medievalist Thomas Asbridge recounts in The Greatest Knight, is a 19,215 line rhyming poem in medieval French. Probably composed a few years after William Marshal’s death at the behest of his friends or children, and pretty well corroborated by other sources where other sources exist, the poem is our only surviving example of a medieval biography of a “normal” person. (Relatively speaking; that little boy grew up to be an incredibly accomplished man but neither a king nor a saint, which is who usually got written about.) Moreover, it seems to have been compiled from stories told by people who actually knew him — which probably means that he was the one who told them about the child who thought the catapult was a swing. The poem exists in only one manuscript,3 discovered by Paul Meyer in the late 19th century and published with partial translations into modern French as L’histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal. (You can find Meyer’s version here or here.) More recently, Nigel Bryant published a full English translation, the text of which isn’t available online, though I’ll point out that even Claude Sonnet does a pretty decent job with screencaps of the original.4
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Greatest Knight by Thomas Asbridge”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2026-04-27.
- As a measure of the degradation of the times, the chroniclers’ English no longer employed grammatical gender.
The ⁊ is a Tironian note for “and”, incidentally, and halechen is obviously cognate with “hallowed”. Like and subscribe for more Old English in the least expected places.
- Stephen’s son and heir Eustace having died by this point, it was agreed that he would keep the English throne but be succeeded by Matilda’s son, the future Henry II, who had already conquered Stephen’s duchy of Normandy.
- Yes, like Beowulf. It’s depressing to realize how many incredible medieval texts survive in only one manuscript. Thank a Benedictine today!
- Claim not verified by anyone who actually reads medieval French, but I didn’t see any obvious errors.
September 4, 2026
Marius Saved Rome … Then They Turned To His Greatest Rival | Rome’s First Civil War
The Rest Is History
Published 3 Sep 2026What was the ancient city of Rome actually like in the first century BC? Who was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, another great, but aristocratic, Roman general who would clash with Gaius Marius in a totemic struggle termed the Social War? And, who were the terrifying Germanic tribes amassing on the borders of the empire, potentially spelling its doom …?
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Rome’s apocalyptic threat from the North, Marius’ wars in defence of the empire, and the rise of his greatest adversary: Sulla.
0:00 Rome’s Most Unlikely Saviour
4:25 The Barbarian Threat to Rome
9:15 Rome’s Catastrophic Defeat
14:04 Marius Rebuilds the Roman Army
16:48 Marius Takes on the Teutones
19:36 The Cimbri Are Annihilated
23:41 Marius Becomes Too Powerful
27:00 The Rise of Sulla
31:02 Sulla’s Ruthless Ambition
35:05 Amazon
36:15 The Extraordinary Wealth of Roman Italy
42:49 Italy’s Second-Class Citizens
46:18 The Social War Erupts
50:44 Rome Fights Back
52:35 Sulla Becomes Rome’s New Hero
56:05 A New War in the East
58:18 Mithridates Takes on Rome
1:02:00 Marius Makes His Comeback
1:04:39 Violence Erupts in Rome
1:07:01 Marius Takes Sulla’s Command
As Tom and Dominic mention during this episode, there’s a members-only bonus episode discussing the (much contested) “Marian reforms” of the Roman army with … Bret Devereaux who is a strong proponent of the notion that the Marian reforms were not a thing.
September 1, 2026
Marius: The Outsider Who Rose to Command Rome’s Army | Rome’s First Civil War
The Rest Is History
Published 31 Aug 2026Who was Gaius Marius, one of the two men who would shape the fate of Rome in the first century BC? Why was his road to fame, fortune, and political greatness, from total obscurity, so dangerous? And, would Marius be the man to face down the existential threat facing the empire during this period?
Join Tom and Dominic as they launch into one of the greatest struggles in the history of Rome, as two titanic generals and politicians clash over hegemony of the empire, in an age of tumult.
0:00 Gaius Marius: Rome’s outsider
6:13 Marius goes to war
12:09 Climbing Rome’s political ladder
18:35 Amazon
19:45 The Roman Republic turns violent
27:00 Marius takes on the aristocracy
31:45 War with Jugurtha
37:53 Marius betrays Metellus
40:12 Marius becomes Consul
44:28 A new threat approaches Rome
45:09 Marius meets his future rival: Sulla
