Kenneth R. Weinstein

For the past three centuries and a half, Cardinal Richelieu has captivated students of politics. 

Frank McCourt, who died in New York City on July 19 after a battle with melanoma, was known to millions as a late-in-life literary sensation, the author, at age 66, of Angela's Ashes, the 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland. But to a few lucky…

Like the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the Russian invasion of Georgia reveals Europe's weakness and disunity in crisis. In fact, many of the debates that have separated the Bush administration from various European governments have also divided European governments from each other, with disagreements…

Dawn Dusk or Night

THE GORE CAMPAIGN has just launched a blistering $ 5.4 million ad campaign that attacks George W. Bush's record as governor on providing health care to children in Texas. After noting that "George Bush says he has a plan to improve children's health care," the ad rhetorically asks, "Why hasn't he…

Since Allan Bloom died on October 7, 1992, those of us who knew him and studied with him have felt his loss like a wound, Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's novel based on Bloom, reopens this wound and brings forth a confusing array of sentiments. But Bellow has it exactly right when he ends the novel by…

Historians nowadays are typically a timid lot, shrinking the grand story of human action to an anxious little academic discipline in which tenure is purchased with endless volumes calculating such minutiae as the quantity of grain consumed by fifteenth-century Guatemalans.

Francois Furet, who died on July 12 at the age of 70, was the greatest living historian of the French Revolution, and far more. In an era when most of his peers were either dedicated subspecialists or social historians, Furet sought to revive the grand historiographical tradition of the 19th…

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the annales school of history, whose adherents have been criticized for shunning politics and focusing instead on demography, social history, and various other minutiae. Le Roy Ladurie himself is best known for his work on artisans, witches, the Languedoc…

WHAT A DIFFERENCE a few months make. In June, at the G-7 summit in Halifax, incoming French president Jacques Chirac emerged as the star, convincing fellow leaders to push for a new peace initiative in Bosnia. Yet during last week's signing of the Dayton accords at the Elysee Palace in Paris,…