When Turkey unexpectedly sided with Germany in World War I, Winston Churchill, as Sea Lord for the British, conceived a plan: smash through the Dardanelles, reopen the Straits to Russia, and immobilize the Turks.On the night of March 18, 1915, this plan nearly succeeded -- the Turks were virtually b[...]

In the first half of the nineteenth century, only a small handful of Westerners had ventured into the regions watered by the Nile River on its long journey from Lake Tana in Abyssinia to the Mediterranean-lands that had been forgotten since Roman times, or had never been known at all. In The Blue Ni[...]

Above Florence and the valley of the Arno stood the Villa Diana, in one of the oldest inhabited parts of Italy, at the end of an old Etruscan road that wound among olive groves and lines of cypresses. The home of Poliziano in the fifteenth century, it had been occupied by the troops of seven differe[...]