War is never pretty, but there can be levels even to the cruelty and ugliness of war, with some almost inconceivably horrendous. Such levels can be measured by one macabre metric: the number of deaths ...

In “The Once and Future World Order,” by Amitav Acharya, and “The Golden Road,” by William Dalrymple, our best hope might be that history repeats itself. A statue of the Buddha in Kamakura, ...

History is seldom tidy. Eras overlap and unfinished business from one period lingers into the next. World War II was a war like no other in the magnitude of its effects on the lives of people and the ...