Should the ancient Greeks-"the oldest dead white European males"-be kept alive in our collective memory? Why study them at all if, by passing their destructive ideas to the Romans and eventually to the rest of Europe, they may ultimately be responsible for much of what's wrong with American society? In this "supremely lucid and elegant" book (The New Yorker), Bernard Knox poses and answers such fundamental questions, helping us to remember the...
Knox analyzes the origins, nature, dynamics, and ruinous end of the Italian and German dictatorships. Emphasizing themes of aggression, fighting power, and staying power, his book offers a comparative overview of the two countries' trajectories, from unification in the 1860s to national catastrophe in 1943-45.
Offering an innovative analytical cross-section of the Italian war effort, from society and culture through politics and war production, the author provides a striking portrait of the military institutions and regime that failed in mobilizing the nation's resources.
To the Threshold of Power is the first volume of a two-part work that seeks to explain the origins and dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. It lays a foundation for understanding the Nazi and Fascist regimes through parallel investigations of Italian and German society, institutions, and national myths, the supreme test of the First World War, and the post-1918 struggles from which the Fascist and National Socialist mo...
To the Threshold of Power is the first volume of a two-part work that seeks to explain the origins and dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. It lays a foundation for understanding the Nazi and Fascist regimes through parallel investigations of Italian and German society, institutions, and national myths, the supreme test of the First World War, and the post-1918 struggles from which the Fascist and National Socialist mo...
Explains why the Italian armed forces and the Fascist regime were so remarkably ineffective at an activity - war - central to their existence. It approaches the issue above all from the perspective of military culture, and offers a social-cultural, political, military-economic, strategic, operational, and tactical cross-section of the Italian war effort.
Linked by the events of Bernard Knox's remarkable life, the twenty-five chapters of "Essays Ancient and Modern" cover subjects ranging from Hesiod, Homer, and Thucydides to Auden, Forster, and the Spanish Civil War. With a masterful eye for the telling detail, Knox continually reminds us that we share the present with antiquity's living past. A soldier in Italy finds a battered book in the rubble of a bombed-out firehouse-- and opens it to rea...
