On the 150th anniversary of the death of the English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, Robert Sullivan offers a portrait of a Victorian life that probes the cost of power, the practice of empire, and the impact of ideas.

His Macaulay is a Janus-faced master of the universe: a prominent spokesman for abolishing slavery in the British Empire who cared little for the cause, a forceful advocate for reforming Whig politics but a Machiavellian realist, a soaring parliamentary orator who avoided debate, a self-declared Christian, yet a skeptic and a secularizer of English history and culture, and a stern public moralist who was in love with his two youngest sisters.

Perhaps best known in the West for his classic History of England, Macaulay left his most permanent mark on South Asia, where his penal code remains the law. His father ensured that ancient Greek and Latin literature shaped Macaulay’s mind, but he crippled his heir emotionally. Self-defense taught Macaulay that power, calculation, and duplicity rule politics and human relations. In Macaulay’s writings, Sullivan unearths a sinister vision of progress that prophesied twentieth-century genocide. That the reverent portrait fashioned by Macaulay’s distinguished extended family eclipsed his insistent rhetoric about race, subjugation, and civilizing slaughter testifies to the grip of moral obliviousness.

Devoting his huge talents to gaining power—above all for England and its empire—made Macaulay’s life a tragedy. Sullivan offers an unsurpassed study of an afflicted genius and a thoughtful meditation on the modern ethics of power.

“Machiavellian”—used to describe the ruthless cunning of the power-obsessed and the pitiless—is never meant as a compliment. But the man whose name became shorthand for all that is ugly in politics was more engaging and nuanced than his reputation suggests. Christopher S. Celenza’s Machiavelli: A Portrait removes the varnish of centuries to reveal not only the hardnosed political philosopher but the skilled diplomat, learned commentator on ancient history, comic playwright, tireless letter writer, and thwarted lover.

Machiavelli’s hometown was the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century, a place of unparalleled artistic and intellectual attainments. But Florence was also riven by extraordinary violence. War and public executions were commonplace—Machiavelli himself was imprisoned and brutally tortured at the behest of his own government. These experiences left a deep impression on this keen observer of power politics, whose two masterpieces—The Prince and The Discourses—draw everywhere on the hard-won wisdom gained from navigating a treacherous world. But like many of Machiavelli’s fellow Florentines, he also immersed himself in the Latin language and wisdom of authors from the classical past. And for all of Machiavelli’s indifference to religion, vestiges of Christianity remained in his thought, especially the hope for a redeemer—a prince who would provide the stability so rare in Machiavelli’s worldly experience.

Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population was an immediate succès de scandale when it appeared in 1798. Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in “perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery,” he found himself attacked on all sides—by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. This book is at once a major reassessment of Malthus’s ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment.

Against the ferment of Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of mankind and the grim realities of life in the eighteenth century, Robert Mayhew explains the genesis of the Essay and Malthus’s preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus’s collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay, and composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy. Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use. Mayhew then pursues Malthus’s many afterlives in the Victorian world and beyond.

Today, the Malthusian dilemma makes itself felt once again, as demography and climate change come together on the same environmental agenda. By opening a new door onto Malthus’s arguments and their transmission to the present day, Robert Mayhew gives historical depth to our current planetary concerns.

The life of Töhötöm Nagy (1908–1979), Jesuit, Mason, and secret service agent, offers fascinating insights into interwar Hungary, the Catholic Church and Vatican diplomacy, Freemasonry, and the activities of communist state security service.

As a young Jesuit Nagy was one of the leaders of a successful Catholic youth movement in interwar Hungary. After World War II he played an important role acting as an intermediary between the Vatican, the Red Army, and the Hungarian Catholic Church. After being sent to South America, he was attracted by liberation theology, but left the Society of Jesus, joined the Freemasons, and did social and philanthropic work in the slums of Buenos Aires. However, in the late 1960s he agreed to work for the Hungarian state security service in return for his repatriation. This latter period is reconstructed from the files of the Historical Archives of State Security in Budapest. Éva Petrás writes with empathy but with a sense of distance of the courage and restless energy of her subject. Her discussion of the limits of free choice and Nagy’s intense struggle to live a meaningful life make this biography breathtaking.

Stoic musings of a philosopher-emperor at war.

Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180), Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, born at Rome, received training under his guardian and uncle emperor Antoninus Pius (reigned 138–161), who adopted him. He was converted to Stoicism and henceforward studied and practiced philosophy and law. A gentle man, he lived in agreement and collaboration with Antoninus Pius. He married Pius’ daughter and succeeded him as emperor in March 161, sharing some of the burdens with Lucius Verus.

Marcus’ reign soon saw fearful national disasters from flood, earthquakes, epidemics, threatened revolt (in Britain), a Parthian war, and pressure of barbarians north of the Alps. From 169 onwards he had to struggle hard against the German Quadi, Marcomani, Vandals, and others until success came in 174. In 175 (when Faustina died) he pacified affairs in Asia after a revolt by Avidius. War with Germans was renewed during which he caught some disease and died by the Danube in March 180.

The famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (not his title; he simply calls them “The matters addressed to himself”) are reflections written in periods of solitude during the emperor’s military campaigns. Originally intended for his private guidance and self-admonition, the Meditations have endured as a potent expression of Stoic belief. It is a central text for students of Stoicism as well as a unique personal guide to the moral life.

In a provocative study, Paul Sonnino examines the diplomatic negotiations that took place in Westphalia from 1643 to 1648, which brought an end to the agonizing civil and religious conflict of the Thirty Years’ War.

Sonnino steps back from myriad historical readings of Westphalia to take the diplomats’ intentions and interactions strictly on their own terms. He places the reader alongside the pivotal figure of French minister Jules Cardinal Mazarin as he maneuvers for gain. The narrative thus offers a firsthand experience of the negotiations as they played out, as well as a penetrating look into the character, personality, and ideas of the crafty cardinal. Although Mazarin acquired the province of Alsace—making him a hero to French nationalists—he had a much more successful peace within his grasp, but lost it when he insisted on annexing the Spanish Low Countries. Sonnino also offers a new interpretation of the origins of the Fronde, linking the French domestic revolt to foreign policy, in Mazarin’s failure to secure peace with Spain.

Based on unprecedented archival documentation, Mazarin’s Quest provides an original and illuminating look at one of the most complicated diplomatic gatherings of all time.

This is a tale that might be told around a campfire, night after night in the midst of a military campaign. The kinetic and garrulous Pancho Villa talking on and on about battles and men; bursting out with hearty, masculine laughter; weeping unashamed for fallen comrades; casually mentioning his hotheadedness—"one of my violent outbursts"—which sent one, two, or a dozen men before the firing squad; recounting amours; and always, always protesting dedication to the Revolutionary cause and the interests of "the people."

Villa saw himself as the champion, eventually almost the sole champion, of the Mexican people. He fought for them, he said, and opponents who called him bandit and murderer were hypocrites.

This is his story, his account of how it all began when as a peasant boy of sixteen he shot a rich landowner threatening the honor of his sister. This lone, starved refugee hiding out in the mountains became the scourge of the Mexican Revolution, the leader of thousands of men, and the hero of the masses of the poor.

Great battles of the Revolution are described, sometimes as broad sweeps of strategy, sometimes as they developed half hour by half hour. Long, dusty horseback forays and cold nights spent pinned down under enemy fire on a mountainside are made vivid and gripping. The assault on Ciudad Juárez in 1911, the battles of Tierra Blanca, of Torreón, of Zacatecas, of Celaya, all are here, told with a feeling of great immediacy. This volume ends as Villa and Obregón prepare to engage each other in the war between victorious generals into which the Revolution degenerated before it finally ended.

Martín Luis Guzmán, eminent historian of Mexico, knew and traveled with Pancho Villa at various times during the Revolution. General Villa offered young Martín Luis a position as his secretary, but he declined. When many years later some of Villa's private papers, records, and what was apparently the beginning of an autobiography came into Guzmán's hands, he was ideally suited to blend all these into an authentic account of the Revolution as Pancho Villa saw it, and of the General's life as known only to Villa himself.

The Memoirs were first published in Mexico in 1951, where they were extremely popular; this volume was the first English publication. Virginia H. Taylor, translator in the Spanish Archives of the State of Texas Land Office, has accurately captured in English the flavor of the narrative.

Socrates without Plato.

Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BC), a member of a wealthy but politically quietist Athenian family and an admirer of Socrates, left Athens in 401 BC to serve as a mercenary commander for Cyrus the Younger of Persia, then joined the staff of King Agesilaus II of Sparta before settling in Elis and, in the aftermath of the battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, retiring to Corinth. His historical and biographical works, Socratic dialogues and reminiscences, and short treatises on hunting, horsemanship, economics, and the Spartan constitution are richly informative about his own life and times.

This volume collects Xenophon’s portrayals of his associate, Socrates. In Memorabilia (or Memoirs of Socrates) and in Oeconomicus, a dialogue about household management, we see the philosopher through Xenophon’s eyes. Here, as in the accompanying Symposium, we also obtain insight on life in Athens. The volume concludes with Xenophon’s Apology, an interesting complement to Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense at his trial.

Exemplary wisdom from ancient Rome.

Valerius Maximus compiled his handbook of notable deeds and sayings during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37). The collection was admired in antiquity and has recently been attracting renewed scholarly attention. Yet to date there has been no modern English translation of Memorable Doings and Sayings. This work is now added to the Loeb Classical Library, in two volumes, a freshly edited Latin text facing D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s pleasing and authoritative translation.

Valerius arranges his instructive examples in short chapters, each focused on a particular virtue, vice, religious practice, or traditional custom—including Omens, Dreams, Anger, Cruelty, Bravery, Fidelity, Gratitude, Friendship, Parental Love. The moral undercurrent of this collection is readily apparent. But Valerius tells us that the book’s purpose is simply practical: he decided to select worthwhile material from famous writers so that people looking for illustrative examples might be spared the trouble of research. Whatever the author’s intention, his book is an interesting source of information on Roman attitudes toward religion and moral values in the first century.

In November 1532, a group of 168 Spaniards seized the Inca emperor Atahuallpa in the town of Cajamarca, in the northern Peruvian highlands. Their act, quickly taken as a symbol of the conquest of a vast empire, brought them unprecedented rewards in gold and silver; it made them celebrities, gave them first choice of positions of honor and power in the new Peru of the Spaniards, and opened up the possibility of a splendid life at home in Spain, if they so desired. Thus they became men of consequence, at the epicenter of a swift and irrevocable transformation of the Andean region. Yet before that memorable day in Cajamarca they had been quite unexceptional, a reasonable sampling of Spaniards on expeditions all over the Indies at the time of the great conquests.

The Men of Cajamarca is perhaps the fullest treatment yet published of any group of early Spaniards in America. Part I examines general types, characteristics, and processes visible in the group as representative Spanish immigrants, central to the establishment of a Spanish presence in the New World’s richest land. The intention is to contribute to a changing image of the Spanish conqueror, a man motivated more by pragmatic self-interest than by any love of adventure, capable and versatile as often as illiterate and rough. Aiming at permanence more than new landfalls, these men created the governmental units and settlement distribution of much of Spanish America and set lasting patterns for a new society.

Part II contains the men’s individual biographies, ranging from a few lines for the most obscure to many pages of analysis for the best-documented figures. The author traces the lives of the men to their beginnings in Spain and follows their careers after the episode in Cajamarca.

A compelling new biography that recasts the most important European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century, famous for his alleged archconservatism, as a friend of realpolitik and reform, pursuing international peace.

Metternich has a reputation as the epitome of reactionary conservatism. Historians treat him as the archenemy of progress, a ruthless aristocrat who used his power as the dominant European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century to stifle liberalism, suppress national independence, and oppose the dreams of social change that inspired the revolutionaries of 1848. Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man who shaped Europe for over four decades. He reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more forward-looking than we have ever recognized.

Clemens von Metternich emerged from the horrors of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Siemann shows, committed above all to the preservation of peace. That often required him, as the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister and chancellor, to back authority. He was, as Henry Kissinger has observed, the father of realpolitik. But short of compromising on his overarching goal Metternich aimed to accommodate liberalism and nationalism as much as possible. Siemann draws on previously unexamined archives to bring this multilayered and dazzling man to life. We meet him as a tradition-conscious imperial count, an early industrial entrepreneur, an admirer of Britain’s liberal constitution, a failing reformer in a fragile multiethnic state, and a man prone to sometimes scandalous relations with glamorous women.

Hailed on its German publication as a masterpiece of historical writing, Metternich will endure as an essential guide to nineteenth-century Europe, indispensable for understanding the forces of revolution, reaction, and moderation that shaped the modern world.

“A superb biographical portrait and work of historical analysis…Let us hope that it will serve if not as a manual then at least as an inspiration—good statesmanship is needed more than ever.”
—Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal

“Brilliantly refreshes our understanding of Metternich and his era…[He] was an intellectual in politics of a kind now rare.”
—Christopher Clark, London Review of Books

“Succeed[s] in forcing readers to wonder whether Metternich’s efforts to defend an essentially conservative order against populists and terrorists are so different from the struggles that liberal democracies face today.”
—Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs

Metternich is often portrayed as the epitome of reactionary conservatism, a ruthless aristocrat who used his power to stifle liberalism and oppose the dreams of social change that inspired the revolutionaries of 1848. But in this landmark biography, the first to make use of state and family papers, Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man, revealing him to be more forward-looking and nimble than we have ever recognized.

Clemens von Metternich emerged from the horrors of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars committed above all to the preservation of peace. As the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister and chancellor he was, as Henry Kissinger has observed, the father of realpolitik. But short of compromising on his overarching goal, Metternich aimed to accommodate liberalism and nationalism. Siemann draws on previously unexamined archives to bring this dazzling man to life.

Hailed as a masterpiece of historical writing, Metternich is indispensable for understanding the forces of revolution, reaction, and moderation that shaped the modern world.

An analysis of how post-9/11 war movies changed from following soldiers on specific missions to chronicling war as a day-to-day occupation.

In 2003, the United States began a war in Iraq without a mission. Instead of fighting to restore peace—the traditional objective of warfare—servicemembers faced the grim reality that there was no goal. Lacking even certainty as to who was the enemy, soldiers discovered that their task was simply to survive.

Mission Unaccomplished explores how Hollywood grasped the experience of Iraq from the perspective of US soldiers, reinventing the war film in the process. Historically, films such as Saving Private Ryan valorized the goals of war by chronicling missions that unambiguously contribute to the defeat of the enemy and the restoration of peace. But in The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, Green Zone, and other recent dramas, soldiers just try to outlast the chaos. Dramatizing the aimlessness of the war, events occur in random order, and soldiers have no sense of how their actions contribute to victory or peace. Looking to recent WWII movies such as Dunkirk and Hacksaw Ridge, which use this same cinematic vocabulary to position soldiering as merely a deadly job to be endured, Alan Nadel argues that the disillusionment of Iraq has influenced cinema broadly, inspiring a newly critical war film genre.

“A wonderfully vivid account of the momentous era they lived through, underscoring the chaotic, often improvisatory circumstances that attended the birth of the fledgling nation and the hardships of daily life.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

In 1762, John Adams penned a flirtatious note to “Miss Adorable,” the 17-year-old Abigail Smith. In 1801, Abigail wrote to wish her husband John a safe journey as he headed home to Quincy after serving as president of the nation he helped create. The letters that span these nearly forty years form the most significant correspondence—and reveal one of the most intriguing and inspiring partnerships—in American history.

As a pivotal player in the American Revolution and the early republic, John had a front-row seat at critical moments in the creation of the United States, from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to negotiating peace with Great Britain to serving as the first vice president and second president under the U.S. Constitution. Separated more often than they were together during this founding era, John and Abigail shared their lives through letters that each addressed to “My Dearest Friend,” debating ideas and commenting on current events while attending to the concerns of raising their children (including a future president).

Full of keen observations and articulate commentary on world events, these letters are also remarkably intimate. This new collection—including some letters never before published—invites readers to experience the founding of a nation and the partnership of two strong individuals, in their own words. This is history at its most authentic and most engaging.

Tales of murder and revenge: the early exploits of detective Shadwell Rafferty

Shadwell Rafferty’s last case may have led to his murder, but naturally—and fortunately, for followers of the indefatigable St. Paul detective—there’s more to the story. Mysterious Tales of Old St. Paul gathers three novellas from Larry Millett, casting back to Rafferty’s beginnings to recount a trio of intriguing cases that honed his skills before he joined forces with Sherlock Holmes.

In “Death in the News,” St. Paul citizens wake one morning to find that the sign on downtown’s tallest building that reads PIONEER PRESS has been altered—at considerable effort—to LIARS. An elaborate prank, yes, but it foreshadows a far worse crime, and Rafferty is on the case. In “The Birdman of Summit Avenue,” cats are turning up dead in the yards of St. Paul’s prominent citizens, and suspicion swiftly falls on the wealthy avian enthusiast Ambrose Harriman, but the case turns darker still when a neighborhood boy is found murdered in Harriman’s yard. In “The Gold King,” an enigmatic stranger arrives in town, calling himself the Gold King and announcing his plans to unearth hidden treasure, which eventually leads to a shocking conclusion.

Steeped in the mystery and history of nineteenth-century St. Paul, these interlocking detective stories feature the characters—and the local character—that have made the Shadwell Rafferty series irresistible. Spellbinding as ever, these stories also afford the curious pleasure of watching Rafferty find his footing on his way to becoming the consummate detective whose exploits have delighted readers again and again.