Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

I can certainly sympathize with writers who don't want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east. Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony. So people at the time really saw fascism not just as an evil but as an aggressive evil that seemed to be spreading.

I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II. After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II? Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks - and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well - because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.