The poet T. S. Eliot was a practical joker, and his second wife, the much younger Valerie, liked to loosen the tops of salt shakers and even bottles of Worcestershire sauce at restaurants. I never saw that side of her – she was a grande dame by the time I worked for her in the late
The cover story in today's New York Times Magazine is "So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class ..." but it wasn't really Bill Gates who had the idea, but historian David Christian, a friend, advisor, and popular Berkshire Publishing author, whose remarkable story is featured in the article. Bill Gates did
In all the news about the Crimea lately, one thing I couldn't quite figure out was how big a place the Crimea is. I then remembered a website I discovered a while back called "MAPfrappe.com." MAPfrappe allows you to take the outline of one place and superimpose it on more familiar places. It's clever enough to
Hooray! We have a government again. That means it's time to get our applications sent off to the Library of Congress for all our upcoming books: This Is America (oh, the irony that this book was delayed by the shut-down); the Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography, which we'll be officially launching in Sydney, Australia in early
1. The northeastern Australian state of Queensland is four times the size of California but has only 3.5 million people - about the size of Connecticut, or one-fifth the size of New York City. 2. You've heard of 3-D printing, right? Well, now there is 4-D printing. This involves printing 3-D items that have the ability
I'm looking forward to digging into our next project - This Is America: A short history of the United States. The subtitle is tentative, and we welcome suggestions from people — but we want to stick with the "America" part in order to generate discussion on the fact that the US is a small part of
A winter's drive to visit historian William H. McNeill leads to a conversation about the importance of community as we plan for extreme weather and think about a sustainable future.
I was outside long before dawn: the full moon luminous behind trees to west. Looking east, where I have a view of the mountains, rippled clouds made a huge ring around the milky open sky. I wondered if that was a lull in the storm, but at 10.30am we have blue sky as well as dark
The Beijing International Book Fair starts tomorrow and I’m delighted to be able to announce that we have just made arrangements for a Shanghai-based publishing company to translate the entire six-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, for distribution in print throughout the People’s Republic of China. This is no small matter, and no small translation job.
I love the case studies we included in the Encyclopedia of Leadership, which Berkshire published with Sage Reference in 2004. Today is 100 years since the death of Robert F. Scott, a famous British explorer. @LettersofNote features the letter he wrote, over the course of his final days, addressed to his “widow” http://bit.ly/gvYrXW. Here is our
