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Reviews and News:

MIT publishes Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak, "'a Berlin-based social theorist and artist' heavily involved in 'queer theory.' When it originally appeared in German, the book was titled Kommunismus: Kleine Geschichte, wie Endlich Alles Anders Wirdroughly, Communism: A Little Story, How Finally Everything Will Be Different."

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Patrick J. Burns reviews Reginald Thomas Foster's Ossa Latinitatis Solathe Latinist's life work, "condensed to just over eight hundred pages, each one filled with enthusiasm for and meticulous study of the language to which Foster has dedicated his life."

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When television was a medical device.

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What makes Canadian food unique? Moose.

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The history and appeal of the French Foreign Legion: "The reasons modern recruits give for joining can seem prosaic. Gareth Carins, a former quantity surveyor, turned down the British Army in favour of the Legion. 'The truth was, I liked the army,' he writes in Diary of a Legionnaire (2007). 'I liked hill-walking, I liked travelling, and I was looking for an adventure.' He reports that people regard his justification with 'a look of disbelief and even disappointment' and rightly so, since the mystique of the Legion can't be so easily captured. The one thing Carins doesn't mention is death, but death is close to the heart of the Legion's attraction."

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Alex Renton takes aim at the brutality of British boarding schools in Stiff Upper Lip.

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Essay of the Day:

The Fifth Marquess of Lansdowne served briefly and, at first blush, unremarkably as Britain's Foreign Secretary from 1900 to 1905, but he was a great negotiator, John Bew and Andrew Ehrhardt argue in The American Interest, and maybe even one of the greatest conservative diplomats of the twentieth century:

"Shut out of Europe, Lansdowne began his effort to rebalance British power with a move on the chessboard that was at once bold, imaginative, and unexpected. In an effort to preserve Britain's privileged access to Asian markets, his first priority was to blunt Russia's influence in the region, which he did by crafting an unlikely alliance with Japan in 1902. As Henry Kissinger later remarked, this was 'the first time since Richelieu's dealings with the Ottoman Turks that any European country had gone for help outside the Concert of Europe.'

"The terms of the deal were even more important. Under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, both nations promised neutrality if either power was involved in a war over China or Korea with one adversary. Should either power find themselves in a war with two states, one alliance partner was required to offer military assistance to the other. This deftly inserted caveat kept Britain out of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. What is more, Japan's emphatic besting of the Russian fleet at Tsushima represented a further vindication of Lansdowne's strategy. Japanese victory ensured that Britain had a powerful ally in the Far East, a point reinforced by the renewal of the alliance in 1905. As a result, as Paul Kennedy has written, 'Britain's maritime position by the second half of 1905 was more favorable than it had been for the previous two decades.'

"While the Anglo-Japanese alliance was the first pillar of Lansdowne's new approach, the question of Britain's European isolation remained unanswered. So it was through the Entente Cordiale of 1904, between Britain and France, that Lansdowne delivered what was, in effect, a 'diplomatic revolution' in British foreign policy."

Read the rest.

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Photo: Sorano

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Poem: Dana Gioia, "The Sunday News"

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Prufrock: Communism for Kids, the Greatest Conservative Diplomat, and the Appeal of the French Foreign Legion - The Weekly Standard