Why should we remember places with strange names, inhabited by tribes whose languages and religions and customs are unfamiliar, most of whom hate us? Why should we remember valleys called the Gowardesh or the Khien Phuong, towns and hamlets with…
Stanislas Wawrinka, the perennial No. 2 Swiss champion — you can talk about predestination in his Calvinist country, but the simpler explanation is that the courtly Wawrinka and the courteous Roger Federer are just four years apart, competing in the…
What happened on 6 February 1934 is known to every Frenchman of a certain age, but of the younger generation one cannot say, because history has been banned (the word is not too strong) from the curricula of public schools….
Defending champion Rafael Nadal dominated French ace Jo-Wilfred Tsonga in his semifinal match at the Monte Carlo Masters notwithstanding pains pretty much all over, they said, including his back. The Spaniard, who was going for his ninth consecutive win here,…
Ring Lardner was the first baseball writer to get down on the page the words of a player expanding upon his experiences on and off the diamond, and You Know Me Al (1914) established most of the conventions for the genre,…
The news from Kenya is that a man named Uhuru Kenyatta won the east African country’s presidential election by a close margin over his rival, Raila Odinga, and the latter, dissatisfied, is taking a challenge to the Supreme Court, in…
He did not win the BNP Paribas Open, but Juan Martin del Potro stole the show at Indian Wells, the first of the year’s arduous hard court tournaments, with a superb display of endurance and concentration in his semi-final victory…
According to reports, the French-led coalition of the willing in Mali’s north killed two of top leaders of AQIM (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, i.e. North Africa) last week, along with an unspecified but reportedly significant number of their…
In the summer of 1864 Lincoln and the Republican stalwarts thought they might lose the November election, and with it the war. The two campaigns were inextricably linked. Without a military breakthrough by Grant in Virginia and Sherman before Atlanta,…
The New York Times may have been characteristically graceless in its initial coverage of Benedict’s decision to retire, as Mr. Pleszczynski noted the other day, but in France, the harlots were out in force to mock the good and saintly…