Wednesday, 3 June 2015

The greatest volume of any single product traded internationally in western Europe during the medieval period.

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In the period 1305-36, when the city [Bordeaux] was prosperous under English occupation, it is estimated that wine exports from Gascony to E...
Tuesday, 2 June 2015

Hernando Cortez cannot be true

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I wrote my Mexico book out of incredulity. Hernando Cortez cannot be true. There cannot have been a human being so brave, charismatic, obst...
Monday, 1 June 2015

War has been much misrepresented, believe me. It's had a disgracefully good press.

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'Are we going to win the war?' asks Claudia. 'Yes. I assume so. Not because of the lord's intervention or because justice...
Saturday, 30 May 2015

More like a war fought at sea than on land

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He had been up at the front and he'd be going back there next week. Or wherever the front by then was - that indeterminate confusion of...
Friday, 22 May 2015

That war [WW2] seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice.

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Yates's stories and novels return repeatedly to the weakness and hysterical anxiety of mid-twentieth-century American masculinity. His ...
Thursday, 21 May 2015

The novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people

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There are large contradictions here. One is that the great historiographical sceptic is also the great sermonising bully, not only telling ...
Tuesday, 12 May 2015

And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?

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'And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?' 'Just in the nick of time. She's slip...