It’s been 30 years since the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’ historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God was broadcast on Public Television’s Masterpiece Theatre. The series remains well-loved and stands as one of the great mini-series in a time when everyone on broadcast television was doing mini-series. The format seems to have been […]

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As every game journalist knows, nothing gets eyeballs like a list. Ten most important this. Fifteen least appreciated that. Fifty sexiest. Hundred scariest. So it’s sort of right and proper to pay homage to one of the first big “list” books, the one that earned its otherwise negligible author eternal fame.
Sir Edward Creasy was an […]

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I don’t read a lot of fiction. And I read even less fantasy literature, Tolkien excepted. But I thought that some good fantasy reading would make a nice Christmas gift for my geeky wife and everyone I asked - everyone - recommended the same series: George R. R. Martin’s still-in-progress Song of Ice and Fire. […]

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Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel sets out to answer a single question and finds a single answer.
Q: Why did the European powers have such an historical advantage over the world they dominated?
A: Geography.
Sure, the book is more complicated than this, but not much. The east-west movement of crops from Nile […]

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You can probably make a strong case that modern historical research was born in nineteenth century Germany. Certainly modern classical history was. In a world where most historians were content to simply repeat whatever the earliest or most notable sources were, Germany was producing scholars committed not simply to working out the contradictions between sources, […]

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Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is one of those classics of English literature that has become so familiar that a lot of people recognize with the content without ever cracking it open. An English doctor gets shipwrecked over and over again in strange worlds, allowing Swift to make a series of satirical comments on his own […]

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A strategy guide is usually little more than a souped up manual. It goes over the basics of a game, often reiterating things you’ll find elsewhere like commands and explanations of iconography. There’ll be tips and tricks, unit breakdowns and maybe a rough approximation of cost/benefit analysis. There are, naturally, cheats. Strategy guides have no […]

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I first became aware of Bill James through an article in Sport magazine about the stolen base. This was the early 80s when Whitey-ball and the exploits of Tim Raines and Rickey Henderson seemed as big news as the home run explosion has been in recent years. James was quoted as being skeptical of the […]

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Greg Costikyan’s article on the history of board and strategy gaming provoked me to return to H.G. Wells’ Little Wars.
Actually, the full title is Little Wars: A Game for Boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books. […]

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