Bertrand Russell, in his eighties, was killing time in an airport, reading a novel that pleased him. He told somebody, "I've dedicated the first 80 years of my life to philosophy. The next eighty go to fiction." He lived to 98. With that inspiration, it is certainly worth tooting my horn over a rare success in the book department, especially because it resulted from deliberate flexibility. A reader's life has not been wasted if they end up with a good understanding of the Great War and the French Revolution. Although I've yet to find a book on the Great War that really blew me away, I have bumbled onto a great book on the French Revolution. Once, when reading a Tolstoy novel, one of his characters was said to be reading Taine, a popular French writer of that era. I had never heard of him, nor have many modern readers, I suppose. What a shame. Actually he wrote a series of seven books about the ancien regime, the Revolution proper, and then the Napoleonic se
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