Patrick J. Walsh

Latest by Patrick J. Walsh in Chronicles

• Reviews

  February 2021

  Dilution of Heroes

  8 min

  It was the great men of France, Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle, who were essential in forging that nation's political institutions and its body of administrative and civil law, Patrick Gueniffey writes in Napoleon and de Gaulle.

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• Blog

  June 25, 2020

  Goodbye, Columbus

  4 ¾ min

  The media perpetuates the pretense that these destroyers of our heritage are expressing the popular will, so as to browbeat the majority of the population and to give cover for spineless politicians to conform to the latest media narrative.

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• Reviews

  November 2019

  A City-State on a Hill

  7 ½ min

  Mark Peterson’s new book traces the development of Boston from its founding in 1630 to the end of the American Civil War. In large part the book is a biography of the city, but from the unique perspective of Boston as a city-state and a commonwealth Peterson calls “remarkable for its autonomy, including an independent religious order free from the Church of England’s scrutiny, and a self-governing republic centered in Boston.’’

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• Reviews

  November 2018

  A Matter of Necessity

  6 min

  God, War, and Providence approaches the story of Roger Williams by exploring the relationship between Puritan Massachusetts and Williams’s Rhode Island, and the relations both colonies had with the Indian tribes inhabiting these regions.

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• Reviews

  September 2018

  A Man of Inaction

  6 ¼ min

  In 1912, at dusk walking home, Henry Adams spotted something he thought to be a hippopotamus in the nation’s capital. As he drew nearer he saw it was President Taft.

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• Reviews

  March 2018

  Two Friends, Two Americas

  6 ¾ min

  Gordon Wood, regarded as the foremost historian of the American Revolution, has written a very fine account of the friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

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• Reviews

  May 2017

  Churchill in Africa

  6 min

  “Half-alien and wholly undesirable” was Lady Astor’s assessment of Winston Churchill. For Winston’s father, Randolph Churchill, had taken an American wife, “a dollar princess,” as many cash-strapped members of the English aristocracy did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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• Reviews

  February 2017

  An American In Great Britain

  6 ¾ min

  George Goodwin’s new book on Benjamin Franklin explores the 18 years Franklin spent in England working as a printer (1726-28) and as an agent representing the Pennsylvania assembly and other American colonies (1757-62, 1766-75).

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• Reviews

  August 2016

  The Romantic Tory

  7 ¼ min

  David Cesarani’s new biography of Disraeli does not surpass Blake’s book. It focuses on the Jewish aspect of Benjamin Disraeli as part of the Jewish Lives series at Yale University Press.

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• Reviews

  March 2005

  Room to Pass

  4 min

  Few people read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) much anymore. Lines from his poems were once on the tips of tongues the world over. Students used to memorize “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” and lines from “Evan-geline” and “Hiawatha.”

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• Reviews

  December 2004

  Daffodils for Wordsworth

  6 ¼ min

  The name Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is a wonderfully poetic one, conjuring an image of a lover of horses on a carefree adventure.

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• Reviews

  October 2004

  The Order of the Silver Cross

  7 ¼ min

  Napoleon rose to power on the destructive wave of the French Revolution. His own synopsis of his remarkable career is succinct—“Corsican by birth, French by adoption and emperor by achievement.”

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• Reviews

  June 2004

  Till Earth Was

  6 ¼ min

  Poet John Clare (1793-1864) seems to have grown from the soil. His last name derives from the word clayer—someone who manures and enriches clay. As a farm laborer, he drew sustenance from the earth.

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• Reviews

  April 2004

  Custom and Ceremony

  7 ¾ min

  The first volume of R.F. Foster’s acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats (The Apprentice Mage) appeared in 1997. Yeats’ son and daughter (now in their 70’s) chose him to be their father’s official biographer after their previous choice, F.S.L. Lyons, passed away, and Foster has been working on this project for the past 17 years.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  January 2004

  The Battle Over Terri

  3 ¼ min

  Michael Schiavo has decided that his wife’s life is without merit. Since her collapse in 1990, he has worked to free himself from the burden of caring for the one he vowed to love in sickness and in health.

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• Vital Signs

  November 1997

  Belated Bloomsday

  8 min

  June 16 is Bloomsday, named after the character of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce's huge book takes place all on that long June day in 1904—250,000 words long, that is. We are told that Ulysses is one of the most important books of the century.

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