"Throughout the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union strategized to prop up friendly dictatorships abroad. Today, it is commonly assumed that the two superpowers' military aid enabled the survival of allied autocrats, from Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shekto Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam. In Up in Arms, political scientist Adam E. Casey rebuts the received wisdom: Cold War-era aid to autocracies often backfired. Casey draws on extensive original...

Around one AM on an early spring morning, two teenage gangs are arrested after clashing violently in one of Venice’s squares. Commissario Claudia Griffoni, on duty that night, perhaps ill-advisedly walks the last of the boys home because his father, Dario Monforte, failed to pick him up at the Questura. Coincidentally, Guido Brunetti is asked by a wealthy friend of Vice-Questore Patta to vet Monforte for a job, triggering Brunetti’s memory that...

"On August 20, 1942, twelve Marine dive-bombers and nineteen Marine fighters landed at Guadalcanal. Their mission: defeat the Japanese navy and prevent it from sending more men and supplies to "Starvation Island," as Guadalcanal was nicknamed. The Japanese were turning the remote, jungle-covered mountain in the south Solomon Islands into an air base from which they could attack the supply lines between the U.S. and Australia. The night after the Marines...