by Jonathan Gifford | Jun 25, 2012 | Leaders from History
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, known to history (thankfully) as ‘Talleyrand’, is the towering figure of late-eighteenth century diplomacy. A man who forged alliances with nation states in the attempt to prevent wars or to influence their outcome, and who...
by Jonathan Gifford | Jun 25, 2012 | Leaders from History
John Churchill, the ancestor of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, rose from relative obscurity to become the first Duke of Marlborough and one of the richest men in England. He served five monarchs (Charles II, James II, William &...
by Jonathan Gifford | Jun 25, 2012 | Culture, Reviews
I have been reading some of the flakier right wing American thinkers, mainly for entertainment, but also because I am fretting about whether there are some interesting ideas about government hidden beneath the strident ranting of most libertarian thinkers. Wanting...
by Jonathan Gifford | Apr 1, 2012 | Leaders from History
In the later phase of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte – then a mere Brigadier General (who had, in fact, recently been struck off by the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety and was therefore technically an ex-Brigadier General) famously said that...
by Jonathan Gifford | Mar 19, 2012 | Culture
In 2010, a ruling by the Supreme Court of America in the now notorious Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), allows corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money as ‘independent expenditures’ on political advertising, arguing that...
