Recent Writing

Here is a round-up of a few recent publications of mine.

My review of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has come out in The New York Review of Books. It’s always hard for me to watch films on my area of expertise, and not grimace at the inaccuracies. Obviously, creative artists should be free to take liberties with the historical record, but they should have good reasons for doing so. I didn’t see any good reason to portray Napoleon Bonaparte as a petulant, whiny, lovesick boor with a perpetually confused expression on his face. And Scott tries to have things both ways, On the one hand, he claims the right to alter the history (“When I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.”) On the other, he insists he is offering an actual historical judgment. The actual life of Napoleon Bonaparte would have made for far more gripping drama than Scott’s work, and I conclude the review by offering a comparison to a much earlier film that took the man’s life much more seriously: Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon.

In the British online publication UnHerd, I have published a short essay on the history of military conquest and its adjudication. In it, I draw a contrast between the early modern period, when military victory was held to confer certain legal rights on the victor, especially rights to territorial annexation (what the great legal historian James Whitman calls the “law of victory”), and our own day, when borders are generally held to be legally unalterable by force. Although the change came about for very good, enlightened reasons, I stress its perverse effect of leading to endless “frozen conflicts” in which large territories (Northern Cyprus, Crimea, etc.) exist for decades or more in legal limbo. I venture some hesitant thoughts about how this all bears on the current war in Gaza, and about what it means to insist on an eternal “right to return,” as opposed to other forms of compensation for lost land.

Finally, I have been writing a regular “Election Chronicle” about the 2024 presidential race, principally for European readers. It is appearing in English on the Tocqueville 21 website, and in French and Spanish translation at the online publication Le grand continent. The most recent number looks at the odd fact that the most significant campaign events are currently taking place not on the campaign trail (where Nikki Haley’s candidacy is almost certainly nearing its end) but in the courts, and in the media’s judgment of Joe Biden’s mental capacity.