Alexander Rose

Oh no, I actually forgot to post about the publication of my new(est) book, Phantom Fleet: The Hunt for Nazi Submarine U-505 and World War II's Most Daring Heist, which some (OK, fine, it was me) have said "is the greatest book written recently about this one particular naval incident." Anyway, so now you know. Available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Bookshop. (Casual Reminder: Father's Day is rapidly approaching . . . ) #submarines #WorldWarTwo #wwiihistory #Uboats #USNavy

@yuanyi_z Wasn't Macaulay in charge of Indian education or the like 20 years earlier? This stuff sounds like him. He probably had it all memorized when he was eight.

However, it's fair to add that the surviving examiners’ reports were scathing about the levels achieved by candidates in the Civil Service examinations. Not everyone was a genius!

Yup, I canceled the ol' Blue "Premium" sub a while back. The anti-Semitism and unbridled racism is unbelievable. I check in occasionally--there's still useful, normal, and amusing stuff, but it's being swept away by the Der Stürmers and their bots. Substack's so much more interesting.

This place is becoming increasingly unusable. Nothing but ragebait, slop, and things you would get punched for if you said them to someone's face.

Renault's fantastic. Fun Trivia Fact for Oneupmanship (the mid-century genius Stephen Potter is also half-forgotten) at Parties: Her name is pronounced Re-nalt, not Ren-o. Whenever this subject comes up, as it unfortunately so rarely does, I always make pedantically sure to correct the other person. Point taken on QT. Lawks-a-mercy, I love him, but the problem with growing up in an exclusively movie/TV/pop-culture environment is that you don't have the deeper literary and historical references that one acquires from reading.

Mary Renault was a hugely popular midcentury writer (JFK called her his favorite author!) you think would be ripe for rediscovery--she did exhaustive research for her historical novels & wrote sympathetically about same-sex relationships. But she's largely fallen off the map.

I love QT, but sometimes he reveals that, um, he's not much of a reader. The Hunger Games owes MUCH more to Mary Renault's The King Must Die (a retelling of the Theseus and the minotaur story) and Roman gladiator history than it does to Battle Royale.

@adrianmckinty Try Ian Banks's The Wasp Factory. Will go down a treat.

Blood Meridian did not go down well w the book group... I guess 120 Days of Sodom, Child of God, The Painted Bird and Use of Weapons are going to have to be off the old list then for my next selection...

Yup, very few examples of actual bayoneting going on, either in Rev War or the Civil War. In any case, if hand-to-hand combat happened a clubbed musket was the most common method. Pretty sure I cover a lot of this in "Men of War." (I'm sure you can pick a lot of holes in it, but the argument's broadly the same.)

@Hammerli280 This is absolutely correct: the bayonet is an incredible psychological weapon.

Tonight on Ken Burns's American Revolution, Rick Atkinson is going is going to tell you: "Muskets are mostly inaccurate beyond 80 yards...so a lot of the killing is done with the bayonet... this is really eyeball to eyeball." The trouble is, this just isn't true. 🧵1/16

He was a great man. I met him once, when, then but a callow youth, I visited the Literary Review office after writing to him to ask if I could review a book. I made the mistake of showing up after lunch, only to find him asleep at his desk with an empty wine bottle next to him. I had to wake him up and ask which book he wanted me to do. He just waved his hand towards a wall of shelves: "Take anything, it doesn't matter." And went back to sleep.

@RichardBratby Mine, too. The greatest postwar prose stylist.

Personal hero.

At his dinner soirees for various luminaries (to which I was not invited) he'd muse on the Deep Questions ("Why is space large?", "Is death real?") and open up a debate. The scientists and profs, all hoping for grants, would prostrate themselves telling him how brilliant he was. Guy thought he was at All Souls High Table conversing with Isaiah Berlin and J.L. Austin, but was in fact merely the worst kind of pretentious, quarter-educated midwit.

@wesyang And you read his emails and instead of this Voltaire-like thinker and wit, he's just a gossipy little bitch.

Everyone in the global ruling elite genuinely liked, trusted, confided in, took counsel from, did business with, and socialized with the guy

@KKriegeBlog Also looks suspiciously AI-generated with that strangely perfect-yet-flawed 109 in the foreground.

I study the 1700s and know from a glance this isn’t Tirpitz. We gotta try to ensure quality history is shared on this disaster of a platform.

@MuseZack @PulpLibrarian Same here. I'm still pretty sure this is going to happen. (I also don't take flights that pass through the Bermuda Triangle.)

@PulpLibrarian You laugh, but as a little kid I was sincerely convinced by the news that Killer Bees were coming from Brazil to take over America and destroy civilization.

The Swarm (1978). "I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friend." There were four 'bees attack humanity' films made in the 1970s and this is certainly the most lavish. An all-star cast, a Jerry Goldsmith score, lots of flame throwers and some very quotable lines. It isn't "the worst film ever made" as some might claim. That's too harsh. It was playing all the right notes, just not in the right order and certainly came out too late in the day as the disaster movie genre was losing steam. If they had released this in 1976, tightened the editing and - I hate to say this - given Richard Chamberlain the lead role and made Michael Caine one of the supporting actors, this would be a decent mid-tier disaster film. Instead it's a glorious swan song for the days when Hollywood thought every airport novel could do great box office with enough stars and enough explosions.

@MuseZack Agree, but the cut-off date should rightly be 1983's "Octopussy," which all discerning people know is the best Bond ever made--mostly because it was written by the estimable George MacDonald Fraser and therefore retains Flashman-like elements.

My opinion that Craig was a better Bond but Moore was in more good Bond movies than anyone except Connery used to be more controversial.

Moore was a fantastic Bond but had the "Michael Jordan at the Washington Wizards" problem of waiting too long to retire. If he'd passed the torch after For Your Eyes Only (the original plan before Brosnan was tied down by Remington Steele!) he'd be more universally acclaimed.

@MuseZack @SCWKorsgaard Alastair MacLean + Frederick Forsyth + Tom Clancy = Perfect Airport Thriller.

@SCWKorsgaard Bring back airport paperbacks with illustrations of military hardware and a raised swastika or hammer and sickle on the cover that let you know shit was gonna go down in those pages.

I miss when they used to make airport paperbacks. Or paperbacks period. Getting rid of cheap paperbacks was a huge reason for the decline of certain customer demos ceasing to buy books, and the decline of entire genres.

I always advise Budding Young Historians to go to archives in person. A lot tend to think that if it's not online it doesn't exist. Fact: The National Archives has digitized (since about 2000) roughly 3% of its holdings. Which means there are hundreds of miles of folders nobody's ever looked at. So, plenty of opportunities still for movie characters to pore over Ye Olde Manuscriptes.

The Internet ruined one of my very favorite kind of movie scenes: the characters going to a library basement, poring through microfilm of old newspaper archives and uncovering the REAL STORY of what happened. A web search just doesn't hit the same way.

@MuseZack It's a wonderful flick (Amadeus), but it's caused no end of trouble (esp. re: Salieri and the Nature of Genius). By the by, read up on the great Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's Jewish/Catholic librettist. Interesting guy!

I love Into The Wild. It's a major film that sticks with me. But it's important to separate it from the real Chris McCandless, kind of like how you can love Amadeus while realizing the real Mozart did revise his own work and got along just fine with Salieri.

Emile Hirsch told me a funny story about how when he & Sean Penn were researching the film they discovered that an alarming number of the people McCandless came across in his travels were sex offenders. At one point they said "Oh shit, do we have this whole story wrong?"

@MuseZack @SandyofCthulhu Absolutely. Casualties were extremely high. The "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" stuff has always been annoying, even if my all-time favorite (ancient) joke remains: Why are French avenues lined with trees? Because the Germans like to march in the shade.

@SandyofCthulhu The French army fought like hell in 1940, they were just badly led. The British expeditionary force got rinsed just as badly, but they were able to retreat across the Channel (while leaving enough vehicles and equipment behind to kit out multiple German divisions.)

I'm upset with the French for their poor WW2 showing, not just because it gave Hitler his best chance to win the war, but more personally (and of far less importance) because it made me fight an uphill fight at Ensemble Studios whenever we had to do anything with a Frankish or French civilization. You see, if there's one stereotype that's known, it's the French being "quick to surrender". But historically, at least before Napoleon III raised his ugly head, the French were military giants. They had far more advanced military philosophy, tactics, and even weapons than other Europeans, which is why they were such a threat for centuries. And I had to keep arguing this point at Ensemble Studios. When we were doing the Joan of Arc campaign, for instance, artists & programmers would often talk about how the French got pushed around by the English. I had to keep pointing out that the ultimate English defeat was one of the most crushing in history. Also that it wasn't the fault of the French people & chivalry - it was the fault of the Burgundians and the AWFUL Valois dynasty. Anyway done venting. Plus I really like the French I've met. At least the ones I'm friendly with. Sure some French on brief acquaintance feel it necessary to insult the USA, but that's hardly unique to France. I get it from British too, and even more often. At least I'll always have Poland. They love Americans there.

@MrBartosh I approve of this message.

And as always, if you want more information on the Culper Spy Ring I’d highly recommend @AlexRoseWriter book “Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring”. Along with the show based on the book “Turn: Washington’s Spies”

Today our 7th Grade #StewieSocialStuds are going back in time to interview Major Benjamin Tallmadge about his role in the American Revolution and the Culper Spy Ring! Students are using the AI Chatbot from @magicschoolai to “interview” Major Tallmadge. Really great and fun tool!

@AlverazRedux Hi, thanks for letting me know. Much obliged. The account has been reported to X. No idea what he thinks he's going to gain, but anyway . . . Signed, Real Alex.

Oh no, I actually forgot to post about the publication of my new(est) book, Phantom Fleet: The Hunt for Nazi Submarine U-505 and World War II's Most Daring Heist, which some (OK, fine, it was me) have said "is the greatest book written recently about this one particular naval incident." Anyway, so now you know. Available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Bookshop. (Casual Reminder: Father's Day is rapidly approaching . . . ) #submarines #WorldWarTwo #wwiihistory #Uboats #USNavy

@guywalters This is like that time Thom Yorke of Radiohead appeared on the cover of an Iranian book about male sexual dysfunction.

I really feel that I've arrived now I'm the poster boy for a launderette in Bavaria.

@yuanyi_z What is this "sometimes" of which you speak?

Sometimes you read something and you lose the will to live.

@edwest There was an interesting book, if I recall correctly, by Colonel Charles a Court Repington (The Times's military correspondent), published in 1919 or so, titled "The First World War." I have it somewhere at home. I think he may have coined the term.

Use of the 'Great War' over time. You can see the uptick after the 1964 TV series, but later persistence is curious

@guywalters If you've ever tussled for a table at a free breakfast buffet at a Marriott you would realize that this is the Best Way.

It's just so German to designate breakfast tables in hotels. Woe betide any guest who wishes to sit at a different table to the one allocated to his or her room. I don't know any other country that insists on this.