Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
Midnight, at the kitchen table, with a bowl of cornflakes.
How do you organize your books?
Hmm. I have about 6,000 books and it’s a bit of a disaster. I pay research assistants to put things in order. We should have it under control by 2028 or so.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
I wasn’t a great reader and have been trying to catch up ever since. I was blown away by Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which was probably not good. My best friend and I would go to a bar underage, drink gin fizz and pretend we were Jake and Bill. I know.
What’s the last great book you read?
“Mid March”. If historians could show the dynamic interaction of people in a society the way George Eliot does, we would have a much better understanding of humanity.
What books are on your night stand?
I was reading about European history during and after the French Revolution in an attempt to trace the complex connection between ideology and foreign policy. I am currently reading Europe After Napoleon by Michael Broers, followed by Christopher Clark’s latest, Revolutionary Spring, about the liberal revolutions of 1848.
Describe your writing routine.
For the history books, months of research, followed by attempts at writing, followed by months of research, for 10 to 12 years. For about 20 years I wrote from the time I put our kids on the school bus until the bus dropped them off at home again. Now I work until it’s time to cook dinner for my wife. My dad, who wrote about 20 books, including a four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, worked 9 to 5, and never at night. We used to call him the lunch pail historian. I tried to be like that.
What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?
I usually read history from a different time and place than I write to give me a contrasting perspective on human behavior. American historians often act as if other countries and other relevant experiences do not exist. They judge America by America’s standards, which raises all kinds of problems.
Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?
Yes, when I read Salinger’s “Nine Stories” for the 73rd time.
What is the last book you read that made you laugh?
“Mid March”. Very. She is the wittiest writer in the English language.
The last book you read that pissed you off?
Almost every book ever written about the Spanish-American War. Even major historians write about it cartoonishly, as a great “imperialist” folly, when in fact it was almost entirely fueled by the horrific humanitarian crisis in Cuba.
Why did you name your book Revolution?
This is the Trump movement: a rebellion against the America that Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and other founding fathers envisioned. It is not the first anti-liberal uprising and it will not be the last.
Compare Trumpism to “the demon spirit in a Stephen King novel.” Do you read Stephen King? Talk more about the comparison.
OKAY. No. I don’t read King. But my daughter does! He read “The Stand” every summer at the beach for about eight years starting when he was 10 years old. So basically I get it.
What’s the secret to warning, but not alienating or disempowering, in your writing?
I’m not sure I’ll avoid alienating people with this book, and I do wish the people who oppose the Catholic liberal ideals of the founders had less power.
A reader finishes the last page and closes your book. What should he do next?
Join the political battle as if it mattered, like they would for raising property taxes.
What do you read to relax?
History. What can I say? And the New York Post sports page.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned from a book recently?
That Evelyn Waugh blamed the evils of the modern industrial world on Protestantism in much the same terms as Patrick Deneen blames the evils of the modern world on liberalism. Talk to each other.
You are organizing a literary dinner. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you call?
It’s basically a question of who I’d like to have with me and Dorothy Thompson, the crusading anti-Nazi journalist of the 1930s and the model for Katharine Hepburn’s Tess Harding in “Woman of the Year”. Not only was she expelled from Germany by Hitler in 1934 for her anti-Nazi reports, but in 1939 she was physically removed from German-American Bund’s pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden for interrupting one of the speakers. I don’t know who she would want to join us, except her second husband, Sinclair Lewis, with whom I would be desperate. Adding Reinhold Niebuhr? It was fun;