Reading Time: 4 minutes How great plans quickly descended into decades of dictatorship, corruption, kleptocracy and violence
Category: Books
The Habsburgs: Rise and fall of Europe’s premier dynasty
Reading Time: 3 minutes They were canny, enduring and keen on expansion. In the end, however, the empire couldn’t survive the First World War
Digging for the bones of a lost Irish hero
Reading Time: 3 minutes Red Hugh O’Donnell was the kind of historical figure who often fires imaginations
Finding new value – and a great back story – in an old film
Reading Time: 3 minutes D-Day the Sixth of June was based on an award-winning novel by Canadian journalist Lionel Shapiro
Hubris, conspiracy and the fall of Margaret Thatcher
Reading Time: 4 minutes The former U.K. prime minister had a radical streak and a thirst for combat that the men she led didn’t share
The Year 1000: a look at globalization’s roots
Reading Time: 4 minutes Author Valerie Hansen demonstrates that the concept of international trading networks and linkages goes back a very long way
Making sense of the world and ourselves in challenging times
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz is a book for these troubled times. It’s as beautiful as it is insightful
The Black Death and its aftermath
Reading Time: 3 minutes Surprisingly, post-Black Death populations tended to live longer and enjoy better health and standards of living
In praise of trashy paperbacks
Reading Time: 3 minutes What could be bad about stories that are pacey, and replete with nefarious dealings, treachery, passion and lust? They’re great fun and you won’t nod off reading them
Thomas King exposed inconvenient Indigenous truths
Reading Time: 5 minutes The author is funny but not fooling around in The Inconvenient Indian, an examination of the movement to eliminate the Indigenous