Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves - all plot and no characters, or made-up characters - Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.

I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Mi…

It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.

Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced…

Wes Clark has the character and depth to be another Marshall or Eisenhower in time of war.

In some ways, Ernst Kaltenbrunner was the worst of the lot. He was a hulking ox of a man, tall and thin, with a thick neck and a scar running from the left sid…

If Paulus's army had capitulated before the end, the Russians would have had the advantage of withdrawing forces against Paulus and against the southern front,…