Lord Byron: A Public Man

I love The Exile's summary of Byron.

Excerpt:

> With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and, like any honorable man, he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate.

http://exiledonline.com/lord-byron-the-exiles-patron-saint/

A bit off-topic: If you want to understand the essential topic of war, Lapham's Quarterly's first issue, States of War, is required reading. It's almost required to be a citizen. I thought I was not one of the ignorant on the topic, but I learned I was only less ignorant.

As I understand it, Lewis Lapham put it together partially in response to the ignorance that spawned the second Iraq war:

Cicero made the point fifty years before the birth of Christ: “Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.” The American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., made the same point in the essay that served as his epitaph when it was published in the New York Times on January 1, 2007, two months before he died. Under the heading, “Folly’s Antidote,” he prescribed strong doses of history as a cure for “the delusions of omnipotence and omniscience,” akin to those that persuaded the Bush Administration to stage a rerun in Iraq of America’s misadventure in Vietnam. The failure to connect the then with the now Schlesinger diagnosed as an illness which, if left untreated, he thought likely to lead to the death of the American idea. Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy marks for the dealers in fascist politics and quack religion. ...

An acquaintance with history doesn’t pay the rent or predict the outcome of next year’s election, but, as the season or occasion requires, it makes possible the revolt against what G.K. Chesterton once called, “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about” ... About the methods of pacifying cities bloodied by civil war, I learn more from Machiavelli’s Discourses or the Memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman than from the testimony of General David Petraeus or the commentary on Fox News. When I see Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero’s hair before sending him into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes. The remembrance of the good old days in ancient Rome serves as a program note for the performances on set with Diane Sawyer and Tim Russert. [1]

Contributors include brilliant people and witnesses to history spanning millenia and nations:

* Thucydides

* Sun Tzu

* Winston Churchill

* George Patton

* George W. Bush

* George Orwell

* Krishna

* Homer

* Lenin

* Saint Augustine

* Albert Einstein

* Kurt Vonnegut

* Jessica Lynch

* (far more than I will list)

.

Buy it now, really:

http://store.laphamsquarterly.us/back-issues/states-of-war

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[1] The whole essay is well worth reading, both for his writing and for his ideas: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-war/gulf-time