The Coup Nobody Noticed
On 8 March 1963, a handful of young Ba'athist officers seized Damascus in a coup so bloodless and unremarkable that the population greeted it with indifference. Nobody noticed. That was the problem.
Blog
Blogs, essays, updates, and occasional notes that sit alongside The Butterfly Effect.
Historical Justice, Such as It Is
Britain forced China to buy opium at gunpoint. Now China is the primary source of the chemicals that make fentanyl, which kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. The symmetry is not accidental, but it is not justice either.
The Matrimonial Entrepreneur
In 1826, a 30-year-old diplomat abducted a 15-year-old heiress with forged letters and a manufactured family crisis, married her at Gretna Green, and nearly got away with it. He served three years in prison. Then helped found New Zealand.
Il Divino
On 6 March 1475, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born in a small hill town in Tuscany. He went on to produce some of the most reproduced images in the history of Western civilisation, and died still working, at 88.
The Death of Stalin
On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died on the floor of his dacha, where he had lain unattended for the better part of a day. Nobody had dared go in to check.
The Chinatown With No Chinese
In the centre of Moscow, just east of the Kremlin, there is a district whose name translates as China City. It has never had anything to do with China.
The Familiar Killer
On 4 March 1918, an Army cook reported sick at Camp Funston, Kansas. By noon, a hundred soldiers had the same symptoms. Within two years, the Spanish flu would kill more people than the war that spread it.
The Prosperity Well
On 3 March 1938, an American drilling crew in the Saudi desert struck oil at Dammam No. 7. The well produced 1,585 barrels on its first day. Eighty-eight years later, that single strike has reshaped the global economy, bankrolled a kingdom, and made the politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries unimaginable without it.
The Tsar Liberator
On 3 March 1861, Alexander II freed twenty-three million Russian serfs. For his troubles, he was blown apart by a bomb twenty years later. The country he tried to modernise would soon tear itself to pieces.
A Room with Enough Shelves
E-books are convenient. Audiobooks are practical. But the paper book is what got me hooked — and what I hope will fill my shelves again one day