Paul Strathern

Fascinating if factual as it states. Never read anything from or about Aristotle. The reason I did was because I do not believe in a flat earth but he did. I was trying to find evidence that it is biblical. Well, what I did find was that Aristotles philosophies were adopted by the Catholics and held as “scripture “….crazy, right? That is what this book states and said you were a heretic if you denied these fake “Christian” dogma! My time ran out before I could finish but that alone ,is never made known or , at least, I hadn’t heard this. Why would they adopt an ancient man’s questions about life and his rhetorical answers as scripture? This is a must read if you are like me and didn’t know how far this highly intelligent man replaced what God had to say. It never was Aristotles intention to become Gods spokesman for the Catholics. It does say they had a hard time “fixing” some of his ideas, like flat earth…

"Europe is a molehill...."Everything here is worn out...tiny Europe has not enough to offer.We must set off for the Orient; that is where all the greatest glory is to be achieved." --NapoleonNapoleon's invasion of Egypt was the first Western attack in modern times on a Middle Eastern country. In this remarkably rich and eminently readable historical account, acclaimed author Paul Strathern reconstructs a mission of conquest inspired by glory, executed in haste, and bound for disaster.In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, only twenty-eight, mounted the most audacious military campaign of his already spectacular career. With 335 ships, 40,000 soldiers, and a collection of scholars, artists, scientists, and inventors, he set sail for Egypt to establish an Eastern empire in emulation of Alexander the Great. Like everything Napoleon ever attempted, it was a plan marked by unquenchable ambition, heroic romanticism, and not a little madness. Napoleon saw himself as a liberator, freeing the Egyptians from the oppression of their Mameluke overlords. But while Napoleon thought his army would be welcomed as heroes, he tragically misunderstood Muslim culture and grossly overestimated the "gratitude" he could expect from those he'd come to save. Instead Napoleon and his men would face a grim war of attrition against an ad hoc army of Muslims led by the feared Murad Bey. Marching across seemingly endless deserts in the shadow of the pyramids, suffering extremes of heat and thirst, and pushed to the limits of human endurance, they would be plagued by mirages, suicides, and the constant threat of ambush. A crusade begun in honor and intended for glory would degenerate toward chaos and atrocity.But Napoleon's grand failure in Egypt also yielded vast treasures of knowledge about a culture largely lost to the West, and through the recovery of artifacts like the Rosetta Stone, it prepared the way for the translation of hieroglyphics and modern Egyptology. And it tempered the complex leader who believed it his destiny to conquer the world. A story of war, adventure, politics, and a clash of cultures, Paul Strathern's Napoleon in Egypt is history at once relevant and impossible to put down.From the Hardcover edition.

The Renaissance was a child of many fathers--none more important than the three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history: Leonardo Da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesar Borgia. Each could not have been more different. They would meet only for a short time in 1502 but the events that transpired, would significantly alter their perceptions--and the course of Western history. In 1502, Italy was riven by conflict, with the city of Florence as the ultimate prize. Machiavelli, the consummate political manipulator, attempted to placate the savage Borgia by volunteering the services of Da Vinci as Borgia's chief military engineer. That autumn, the three men embarked together on a brief, perilous, and fateful journey through the mountains, remote villages and hill towns of the Italian Romagna--the details of which were revealed in Machiavelli's often-daily dispatches and Da Vinci's meticulous notebooks. In a book that is at once a gripping adventure story and a trenchant analysis of how men make history, The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior limns each man's personality, their interactions, and the forces that shaped their world. Superbly written, meticulously researched, here is a work of narrative genius--whose subject is the very nature of genius itself.From the Hardcover edition.

Brief biographical study of the life and ideas of Virginia Woolf.