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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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