Category: Biography

When anarchy reigned in England

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Why, you might ask, should an American care to read a history of medieval England? Of course, that’s a question most of us would shrug off. But for me the reasons are clear. The period before and after the Norman Invasion of 1066 was a time with clear echoes...

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The remarkable spymaster who launched the US into espionage

A review of Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, by Douglas Waller. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Donovan was a law unto himself both in his (often-public) private life and in his extended role during World War II as the founding director of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He went head-to-head with many of the most powerful, stubbornest, and most manipulative figures of the age, including Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevent, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-Shek, and J. Edgar Hoover — and, more often than not, came out the winner.

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They personified Gilded Age excess

He was born shortly after George Washington began his second term as President. When he died a decade after the Civil War, he was the richest man the new nation had ever seen. His fortune of $100 million “controlled one of every twenty American dollars in circulation at that time.”...

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