I had the flu. It’s taken me a little while to come around to that point of view. When asked, at the time I told people things like “It’s just an upper respiratory infection” or “I have bronchitis.” And, even now, I have an occasional, lingering cough. Let’s go through it. March 7, Thursday. I … Continue reading Recovery
Tag: Napoleon
In January I rewatched the Sharpe movies made in the mid-90s, based on the Bernard Cornwell novels about the Napoleonic Wars and starring Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, for the first time in years. The only ones I didn’t watch are the two post-Waterloo movies made about a decade ago that are set in India; … Continue reading The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard
Two weekends ago, while going through some boxes from my move two years ago, I found my Age of Empires III collector’s edition. When I moved, I neatly repacked that collector’s edition box, and therein were my game discs. Since I didn’t have them, I couldn’t play the game (which meant that, when I felt … Continue reading Dispatches from the Front
I have finished War and Peace. The BBC audio drama, that is, not the novel. Which I have read; I read it in high school a long time ago. It was a bit flat. No, more than a bit. It was a lot flat. A decade after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Rostov family and … Continue reading War and Peace
My army died on the beach. The battleground was the Carolinas—a sandy, swampy land of broad beaches, surf, and room to maneuver. My town was situated along the shore, too close to the shore for my comfort, but I had no say in the matter. As my ally I had the Turks; Suleiman the Magnificent … Continue reading On the Horrors of War
Whenever I find the right place, I have a poster for Age of Empires II framed and ready to hang. It was a marketing poster for the Nintendo DS version of the game that released in February, and when we were done with it at the store I brought it home, bought a frame at … Continue reading On Age of Empires Fun
I ordered from Amazon’s UK division recently Naomi Novik‘s debut novel, Temeraire, the first book in an alternate history series that posits that alongside Nelson’s Navy and Wellingon’s Army Britain fought the Napoleonic Wars with a dragon Aerial Corps. I was impatient. I could have waited and bought the novel’s American paperback, entitled His Majesty’s … Continue reading On Temeraire