Historical Events
The Wild Life and the Ridiculous Death of Pythagoras
You all know about Pythagoras, the triangle guy? His brilliant theorem to calculate the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle is elegant, and unlike almost every other idea the ancient…
Marcus Aurelius: A Timeless Guide to Life from the Philosopher King
Roman emperors are perhaps remembered for their notoriety more than anything else. We remember Julius Caesar, after whom all the subsequent rulers took their name, as a brilliant commander (and because he…
Baldassare Castiglione: The Courtier, Perfected
The term “Renaissance Man” is a reasonably well known one, which draws a pretty wide set of definitions but which basically refers to someone who is accomplished in multiple fields seen as…
Das Kapital: What Did Marx Actually Have to Say?
Politics in the modern world is increasingly divisive. In the US political system labels matter, and it can be the death knell for a political career to be called “socialist” in reference…
Fire from the Sky: The Terror of the Paris Gun
On the 23rd March 1918 at 7.18 in the morning the city of Paris was rocked by a sudden, unexpected explosion on the Quai de la Seine. The blast came without warning,…
666: Making Sense of Revelations and the Roman Connection
The Book of Revelations is a total trip. It is hard to read its apocalyptic foretellings and warnings of chaos and catastrophe without feeling that someone, somewhere, was smoking something pretty strong.…