Richard Hofstadter is a writer so famous that even people who have never read his books somehow feel they know what he had to say about “the paranoid style” and “anti-intellectualism in American life.”
I picked up Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day entirely by accident. I was in New York and needed a copy of my wife’s Presidential Instant Message book to give to a television producer.
If Aristotle is right that tragedy produces feelings of pity and terror, then Max Hastings' Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45 rates among the most tragic books I have ever read.
After Adrian Goldsworthy’s outstanding biography of Julius Caesar, the chronologically minded reader will almost inevitably next turn to Anthony Everitt’s Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor.
Somewhere in The Battle for Spain, Anthony Beevor remarks that the Spanish Civil War may be the only conflict in history to have had its history written by the losers.