For the World War II submariner, every day was a life-or-death trial: going to sea for months at a time; existing in dank, claustrophobic conditions; enduring long stretches of monotonous silence punctuated by adrenaline-spiked episodes of...
As former ambassador to Moscow, Rodric Braithwaite brings unique insights to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The story has been distorted not only by Cold War propaganda but also by the myths of the nineteenth century Great Game. It moves from the...
In the fascist regimes of Mussolini’s Italy, Salazar’s Portugal, and Hitler’s Germany, the first mass mobilizations involved wheat engineered to take advantage of chemical fertilizers, potatoes resistant to late blight, and pigs that thrived...
During China's Great Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the famous "Little Red Book", officially known as Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong, was a must-have item for the Chinese. It is estimated that during those years altogether 5 billion...
For a period of some twenty-eight months of the Second World War, from February 1941 to May 1943, the battlefield fought upon by one German army extended across twenty degrees of longitude and through a sickle of Arab countries from Egypt to...
In working together on two challenging new documentaries—South of the Border and the forthcoming The Untold History of the United States series for Showtime—filmmaker Oliver Stone engaged with author and filmmaker Tariq Ali in a probing,...
The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying...