Starting today, George Orwell’s diaries start appearing as a blog, 70 years after they were written (you may recall a similar project some time back blogging the diaries of Samuel Pepys). By way of introduction:
From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual [...]
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.
Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.
The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy [...]
Wired notes the Honda Super Cub’s 50th anniversary and 60-millionth unit sold. That places the first sales in 1958, which also happens to be the year I moved (with my family) to Tokyo.
The Cub must have been an immediate hit, because I remember them as ubiquitous. Years later, attending New College in Sarasota Florida in [...]
I’ve been reading Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke.
Winston Churchill was readying his book Great Contemporaries for the press. It was August 1937. In it was his article on Hitler, written a few years earlier. “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms,” he said, “have found a highly [...]
David Kaiser: Facts are stubborn things
A couple of days ago President Bush ignited a firestorm before the Knesset by attacking those who support talking with hostile foreign leaders as practitioners of appeasement. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” he said, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, [...]