Today, July 10, saw the death of Hadrian and the birth of John Calvin. Cursèd day!

The past (reviews):

• Alexander Stille’s new book (The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, June) is really getting the New York set all worked up—“What if there were a cult, but, get this, it’s in Manhattan!” [Manhattan is stealing valor from Oneida County. —Steve] There are reviews-cum-summaries in the Journal (Alex Mar), the Times (Alexandra Jacobs), and online at The New Yorker (Jessica Winter). From the local Post’s coverage (Thomas Beller):

  It is this gritty, out-of-control (and cheap!) New York that is the principal setting for Alexander Stille’s wonderful and troubling new book, The Sullivanians, about a renegade psychoanalytic institute that evolved into a kind of urban commune and then into a frighteningly insular and sadistic cult that held its members in its grip for two generations.

  We tend to think of cults as apart from society, removed from the very idea of geography. (Where was it again that Jim Jones had his followers drink that Kool-Aid?) But the Sullivanians lived in a bunch of apartments and a townhouse on the Upper West Side. Stille’s meticulous reconstruction of the personal history of those whose lives were profoundly shaped by the group has a thumping, almost thriller-like question propelling its plot: How were such otherwise bright people seduced into these radical and ultimately tragic living arrangements?

  [Not really mysterious if you’ve paid attention to the internet for the past decade. —Chris]

  We confess we don’t see the appeal, but, you know, whatever gets the people going. From the Times [The pick of the litter, review-wise. —Jude] kicker: “Its only flaw, narratively speaking, is that this key party of self-actualizers features no particular cheerable hero or heroine—only survivors with varying degrees of rue, blinking as the light of hindsight intensifies.” Cheerful!

• It is our policy always to mention Plotinus when he comes up. [That’s right. —Chris] As such, we include, dutifully but regretfully, this amateurish piece on Anthony Long’s recent book of essays (Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus, 2022) at the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

  Long has produced . . . a most instructive and comprehensive study of the concept of the rational self, and of rationality in general, in the Greek philosophical tradition. I would go so far as to say that, if given close attention, it could even prove a life-changing volume.

  [Well, o-kay then. —Jude]

  • From the same publication, however, comes a review from Lloyd P. Gerson [Who completed the new Cambridge edition of the Enneads in 2018. —Chris] of a new commentary on Plotinus (The Enneads of Plotinus: A Commentary; Vol. 1: 2020, Vol. 2: February), the second volume of which was out this past winter in translation from Princeton, and which is apparently rather good: “It would be difficult to think of a single volume that is a more reliable guide to the mind of Plotinus.”

    [Porphyry hardest hit. —Jude] [While editing this newsletter I flipped back through the Life, which for some reason has been sitting on my desk for two or three years. A touching story:

    He once noticed that I, Porphyry, was thinking of removing myself from this life. He came to me unexpectedly while I was staying indoors in my house and told me that this lust for death did not come from a settled rational decision but from a bilious indisposition, and urged me to go away for a holiday. I obeyed him and went to Sicily, since I had heard that a distinguished man called Probus was living near Lilybaeum. So I was brought to abandon my longing for death and prevented from staying with Plotinus to the end.

    —Chris]

  • And while we’re on BMCR and indulging hobbyhorses: ships. [Roman ships! —Jude]

• A man in Delaware collects historical menus. The New Yorker is on the case:

  Henry Voigt is maybe the world’s preëminent collector of historical menus, with some ten thousand pieces, including menus from love hotels and cabarets, luaus and chop-suey halls, secret societies and utopian communes, one-cent restaurants, grand banquets, gentlemen’s ordinaries, ladies’ teas, riverboats, airplanes, weddings, the Harvard-Yale game, an American Can Company banquet, Walt Whitman’s favorite bar, J. P. Morgan’s brownstone, menus made of silk, menus made by Tiffany, menus prepared for the Coney Island Hebrew Association (items included “circumcise cocktail”), for Ellis Island to greet arrivals, for San Quentin State Prison to celebrate Chinese New Year, for a Pennsylvania chapter of the Ku Klux Klan’s dinner dance (ham sandwiches with catsup), for New York’s Ichthyophagous Club in 1884 to “overcome prejudice directed towards many kinds of fish” (suprême of shark, essence of devilfish), and for the American Vegetarian Society, whose 1852 feast (pumpkin pies, melons) was, alas, cancelled and replaced by a foodless “feast of reason.”

  We must warn that this piece is for only those with a high tolerance for the “New” Journalism’s imitators. [I assume, if our readers have stuck with us thus far, they are game for that sort of thing. —Chris]

• Steve said to put this in. [I am once again recommending Peter Brown’s new book (Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, June). I mean, it’s Peter Brown. Come for how he invented Late Antiquity, stay for his stories about his ancestors and his childhood, as well as his trips to Iran in the ’70s. —Steve] [Nothing had actually ever happened between the ascension of Diocletian and the Second Council of Nicaea before Pete Brown came along. —Chris]

• Wilfred McClay has waded into the ongoing pop-historiographic conversation about the year that Ferdinand II was elected Holy Roman Emperor with a review of David Hackett Fischer’s African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (2022). “It does what the best historical writing always does: It lifts us out of the preoccupations of the moment, and gives us wider horizons and longer perspectives.”

The future (forthcoming titles):

September 12 | Yale University Press

Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens’s London
by Lee Jackson

From the publisher: Tourists have sought out the landmarks, streets, and alleys of Charles Dickens’s London ever since the death of the world-renowned author. Late Victorians and Edwardians were obsessed with tracking down the locations—dubbed “Dickensland”—that famously featured in his novels. But his fans were faced with a city that was undergoing rapid redevelopment, where literary shrines were far from sacred. Over the following century, sites connected with Dickens were demolished, relocated, and reimagined.

Lee Jackson traces the fascinating history of Dickensian tourism, exploring both real Victorian London and a fictional city shaped by fandom, tourism, and heritage entrepreneurs. Beginning with the late nineteenth century, Jackson investigates key sites of literary pilgrimage and their relationship with Dickens and his work, revealing hidden, reinvented, and even faked locations. From vanishing coaching inns to submerged riverside stairs, hidden burial grounds to apocryphal shops, Dickensland charts the curious history of an imaginary world.

[See Zadie Smith a week or two ago in The New Yorker On Killing Charles Dickens. —Jude]

[’s review:

This is a bit silly, a bit aimless, a bit self-indulgent; it’s also very short, and if you aren’t charmed by Zadie Smith at her bloggiest, I’m not sure what to tell you.”

Recently, I wanted to kill Charles Dickens after reading the chapter on him in Parallel Lives (1984). —Chris]

Act 1: Empire, &c. 

[That’s my favorite Wilco song. —JDR]

Journal entries:

• In February, Peter Wilson’s study of the military rise of the German Empire (Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500) got its American release. The Journal has a lengthy summary review from William Anthony Hay:

  Germans, the story goes, have long shown a predisposition to aggressive war, though many reasons for their belligerence have been advanced over the years: a fear of encirclement, a lack of easily defended borders, a hostile neighborhood, the burdens of balance-of-power leadership. For many, Germany is a kind of caricature: a nation that was unified in the late nineteenth century by militant Prussia (bristling with soldiers and discipline) and that, in the twentieth, launched two world wars that ended in total defeat.

  In Iron and Blood, Peter Wilson, a professor at Oxford, is eager to widen our perspective and avoid simple determinism or reductive stereotype.

  From the Foreign Affairs mini-review: “This astonishingly ambitious and detailed 900-page study of militaries in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland is not for the faint of heart.”

• Philip Stern’s Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (May) examines the royal charter companies (and, in what we suspect might be a bit of conflating things that aren’t the same, private modern corporations) that drove British imperial expansion. In a group review for the Journal, Tunku Varadarajan:

  England’s “portfolio colonialism” came into existence through royal charters, by which the sovereign doled out juicy commercial advantages to those who petitioned for them. These plums ranged from exemptions from duties and taxes to the prerogative to claim territory overseas in the name of the crown (as Gilbert did in Newfoundland). The terms could be audacious, Mr. Stern observes, allowing companies to run all sorts of enterprises over “ill-defined geographic spaces insouciantly superimposed over indigenous sovereignty.” Breathtaking claims to territory or jurisdiction resulted in assertions of rights to “sacrosanct” private property that were enforceable in British courts. The charters redrew the maps of the world.

• A new book by Stefan Rinke on the clash of two empires, Spanish and Aztec, focuses on the fall of Tenochtitlan in particular (Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan, June). It appears to be pretty hard on the Spanish; the Aztecs seem to get off pretty lightly, considering the whole human sacrifice thing. 

Side hustle:

• In The American Conservative, Bruce Gilley—no stranger to controversy—took on one of the most beloved pieces of anticolonial history, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998). Hochschild and Gilley followed with a pointed exchange of letters. Who doesn’t love drama?

• Also in The American Conservative, Jude Russo [Hey! That’s the name of this supplement’s editor! —JDR] [Alright, calm down. —Chris] wrote a somewhat left-handed but positive treatment of Nigel Biggar’s evaluation of the British Empire (Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, May):

  The truth is its own reward. Setting the record straight is per se a worthy endeavor. But what is, for Biggar, the point? His is not an idle self-esteem campaign for Britons and Commonwealth residents of colonial descent. It is here that Colonialism runs aground. Biggar is no nostalgist; he concedes that, while empire worked for Britain and her subjects, at least for a time, that time has passed. He argues that anti-colonial thinkers are challenging Britain’s successor, the “liberal international order” under American hegemony, which he accepts as a force for good.

• Speaking of Hochschild, the man himself has a review in our New York–based sister publication about American history “projects” (The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum, 2021–2023; The 1619 Project, 2023) [Stay tuned for WRB’s launch of the 1994 Project, named for the year several epoch-changing editors landed on this mortal coil. —JDR] [American History Y. —Chris]:

  The most notable thing about the 1776 Curriculum, however, is what is not in it. Its view of American history is all politics and no economics. It praises the right to vote (conceding that it took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to fully enforce that right), trial by jury, and the separation of powers. All these, of course, are splendid principles, but they do not take account of the fact that ever more power is not political. Today Walmart has nearly twice as many employees as the entire active-duty US military. Washington lobbyists outnumber members of Congress roughly twenty to one (that’s just the registered lobbyists), and they often take a hand in drafting laws. Many state governments reliably bow to the power of major industries: petrochemicals in Louisiana, for instance, or coal in West Virginia. For a century and a half, economic power has been increasingly concentrated in corporate empires and the families who own them. A study a few years ago found that the three richest Americans possessed more wealth than the poorest 160 million, and the disparities since then have only grown. It’s a far cry from “all men are created equal.”

From the front lines:

• Thomas Madden at the New Criterion describes this study of the Ottoman golden age (The Lion House: The Coming of a King, November) as “not quite history but not quite fiction,” but gives it the thumbs up anyway:

  Suleiman’s reign had no shortage of powerful women. Indeed, it marks the beginning of what historians refer to as the “Sultanate of Women.” Suleiman’s mother, Hafsa Sultan, exerted great influence before her death in 1534, as did Mahedrevran, the mother of Suleiman’s elder son. And no one, save the sultan himself, had more power and influence than Hurrem, who became Suleiman’s closest and most beloved counselor. Defying centuries of tradition, Suleiman married Hurrem, and she bore him six children. Hurrem had such power over her husband that many suspected her of employing witchcraft. The reader will turn nearly half this book’s pages, though, before finding Hurrem, and only a smattering of those that follow refer to her, the extraordinary marriage, or the intrigues of the harem. De Bellaigue’s Hurrem is a schemer, like everyone else. But she remains hidden behind the latticework screens of the inner palace and therefore plays only a minor, mysterious role.

Read more

How often do you get to say you saw something as it first happened?

Editorial note:

We’ve gotten a lot of requests for someone to do more history and classics content here at the WRB, and keeping with the typical model for a Supplement (something Chris may have the inclination but certainly lacks the learning or time to deliver properly), this ought to be reaching you on the second Monday of every month going forward.

Alasdair Gray exhorted the Scots to work as if they live in the early days of a better nation; this quotation was considered so bracing by his countrymen that they put it in big letters on the exterior of the Scottish Parliament Building, which, unfortunately, is the ugliest structure in Europe. Not a very glamorous setting for your best line to be memorialized.

[I’ve always thought that Gray’s dictum had two readings, though. The first is the conventional one—the cheering-on of national development, an expression of the untiring love of work that propels the British traditions of socialism, the belief that the future can be made better. That’s the meaning the Scottish nationalists mean to put on it. But there’s a darker way of seeing it: Pretend things aren’t so bad right now. That seems to be the meaning the Scottish Parliament Building actually puts on it. The Managing Editors have tasked me with covering history and classics; this is my first effort. Read as if you live in the early days of a better supplement. —Jude] [I think this is a pretty good first effort. —Chris]

Looking back:

• Oxford has published a bunch of new texts of Proclus, edited by Gerd van Riel. We have seen no reviews of them yet, and, as Jude has lamented elsewhere, there’s not much good criticism on criticism anymore. We’re excited anyway. Here’s a Bryn Mawr review of a collection of essays on Proclus to which van Riel contributed (All from One: A Guide to Proclus, 2017) (and contributed well, by the reviewer’s lights).

• For the New Criterion, Mark Alan Hewitt has reviewed a new book on architectural history (The Story of Architecture, 2022) from Witod Rybczynski, whose 1986 Home—a history of domestic architecture—was a surprise hit. Hewitt: 

  In the end Rybczynski has written an idiosyncratic personal chronicle that presumes his critical persona will generally comport with that of many educated, but non-architect, readers. It will not please academics or avant-garde designers who maintain the positivistic materialist worldview that guides most development today. And it wasn’t produced with the kind of care that could make it a surprise bestseller like Home in 1986. In some ways that is too bad, because the story it tells has a moral the world needs to hear.

• James Hankins has a new book out from Harvard University Press on political theory in the Italian Renaissance. His last book, on “virtue politics” in that era (and our own), made quite a splash in the right places. The new tome (Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy, March) has not been widely reviewed yet, but we will keep you apprised.

• [As a child, I had an affinity for ships and books about ships; I intended to join the Navy until a quick look at the Academy’s high-dive test put the kibosh on those ambitions. (I was, and remain, a weak swimmer.) Nevertheless, I still like ship books. If you do too, read on. —Jude]

  David Grann, of The New Yorker, has written something about eighteenth-century sailing (The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, April)—specifically about a group of alleged mutineers from a British ship, the Wager, who washed up on the South American coast. Per the Times: 

  Grann … ends The Wager by drawing our attention to the bigger picture, even as the authors of the journals and books he consulted rarely depicted themselves as part of the imperial machine. Their struggle for survival consumed them; reading about their struggle for survival intrigued me—as Grann, the consummate narrative architect, must have known it would.

  [Golly! —Jude]

  • N.B.:

    Hey, look, the Times has an interview with Grann, too! Golly gee! [Books coverage is amazing. —Chris]

Looking forward:

• Oxford’s new Proclus is part of its encouraging ongoing project of renewing its oldest texts, many of which are in shameful condition—the excellent Cynthia Damon revised Caesar for the series in 2015, the first new edition for the Clarendon Press in over a hundred years. In December, they’re setting their sights on the similarly antiquated Aristotle texts with Christopher Rowe’s new edition of the Eudemian Ethics. Watch this space!

• There are several recent books about empire and imperialism, and several more coming out next month. These books have received reviews, and will receive more. I suspect we’ll be steering the good ship Supplement toward Theme Island for its second edition.

• We’re also looking forward to Maurizio Isabella’s Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions (Princeton University Press). The Anglo-American political tradition is largely based on assumptions—social stability and Protestantism—that simply did not (and do not) obtain elsewhere. Isabella appears intent to explain the historical conditions that shaped the Southern European corporatist political traditions. ¡Arriba!