John le Carré is widely known for his masterful and intricately plotted Cold War-era espionage novels and post-Cold War novels of political intrigue. Born David John Moore Cornwell in 1931, he served in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps in the early 1950s before completing a first-class degree in modern languages at the University of Oxford.…
Authoring a novel, as any writer will tell you, demands time, patience, discipline, creativity, and energy. While these demands are fundamental in the life of every writer, you, the author, must first determine how you mean to create or ‘build’ your novel. Will you plan your novel to a greater or lesser degree of detail,…
Americans in 1930 saw a worsening of the financial crisis known as the Great Depression, the beginning of construction of the Empire State Building in New York City, and the publication of The Maltese Falcon, a novel unlike anything American literature had ever seen before. Gritty, realistic, minimalist, and unsentimental in style and tone, the…
Widely considered by many readers, authors, and critics to be one of the world’s greatest writers, Leo Tolstoy remains a towering presence in the literary world. Among his vast literary output stand his two fictional masterpieces: War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Epic in its scope, War and Peace chronicles the French Emperor Napoleon’s disastrous…
The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy Thomas Lawrence Connelly and Archer Jones (LSU Press Paperback Edition 1998) The late academic historians Thomas L. Connelly and Archer Jones offer a detailed analysis of the competing factions within the Confederate high command that sought to influence Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s war policy during…
Among those Union Army generals who served and fought during the American Civil War, the name of Grenville Mellen Dodge is not well-known. In comparison to the wartime achievements of, among others, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan, General Grenville Dodge’s accomplishments were of a more modest nature. Nevertheless, he made his…
In the small community of Long Sault, situated in the township of South Stormont along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River in eastern Ontario, Canada, stands an obelisk that honors the more than 40,000 Canadians who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the American Civil War (1861 – 1865). Canada –…