Helen Andrews

From Radical Joe: A Life of Joseph Chamberlain , a reminiscence from his primary-school teacher: At one time, they wanted to get up a ‘Peace Society.’ I was very much against it, as I felt sure it would stir up quarrels among them, and they were of course forbidden to fight. However, . . . . Continue Reading »

A list compiled after being stumped by reference to an “equitable mustache” in Looking for a Ship and then turning to  Google Books with mischievous intent. All of these are real. amiable equanimous tetragrammatonic guileless competent sincere white inquiring drooping dihedral . . . . Continue Reading »

Shiva Naipaul is not as well known as his Nobel-laureate brother, but a devoted minority considers him the better writer, and I do not think there can be much question that he is the only Naipaul with a sense of humor visible to the human eye. He is also the more tragic of the two. Shiva died of a . . . . Continue Reading »

Beet risotto is a cultural incongruity. They don’t grow a lot of arborio rice in the borschtophagous regions of Eastern Europe, and if you look up “beets” in the encyclopedia of Italian cuisine, the first thing it will tell you is that they are used “in dishes like insalata . . . . Continue Reading »

In the late 1920s, T. E. Lawrence contemplated writing a biography of Sir Roger Casement, with whom he had much in common — both were famous for speaking out on behalf of dark-skinned men treated badly by empires, and for having sex with them. Casement’s career was extraordinary even . . . . Continue Reading »

The compliance specialist from Buffalo, N.Y., who became prime minister of Somalia has got nothing on this guy. From King Zog: Self-Made Monarch of Albania (p. 66): The new regime in Tirana was a motley coalition of liberals, Kosovars, opposition beys, and mutineers, united by antipathy to Zogu. . . . . Continue Reading »

Long before I read his memoir , the first thing I ever knew about the actor Sterling Hayden was what my father told me when we watched Dr. Strangelove — that the man who played the screw-loose Commie-hating General Ripper had once been a Communist himself, had named names to HUAC, and . . . . Continue Reading »

D.C. city councilman Harry Thomas Jr. knows where he stands . Ditto Jack Evans of Ward 2: “I don’t want to solve global warming . . . I just want bacon with my breakfast.” These are the same comedians who swapped interpretations of the Nativity story  on the City Council . . . . Continue Reading »

The saddest author bio for a magazine editor to encounter is one that says “So-and-so is working on a biography of X,” especially if X is the subject of the article the bio is attached to. The only way to deal with a byline like that is to smile and say, well, fella, I sure hope that . . . . Continue Reading »

History Today has a piece out called ” American Pie: The Imperialism of the Calorie ,” the story of the statistical regimentation of food. It started with the invention of the calorimeter (pictured), which was an American invention, of course. The native cuisine of the U.S. has . . . . Continue Reading »