Napoleon's plan was for his army to arrive in Egypt not as conquerors but liberators. Landing in Aboukir Bay on July 1, 1798, the French captured Alexandria the next day, overcoming the surprised Mamelukes - the despotic local rulers - with a combination of modern artillery and infantry tactics.
Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated; it's a different world than now.
My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with - the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries - is lost, and is not mourned enough.
I am definitely of the method-acting school. Everything to me is about sound. I don't dress up in period costumes or anything like that. I'm very aural. When I'm working, I try to soak up the sounds of an era.
'The Secret Agent' remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside. But 'Under Western Eyes' dares to leap inside - not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, 'the autocracy in mystic vestments.'
For fifty years, debates about French anti-Semitism mainly revolved around France's record during the Second World War, when the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans.
In 1817, Czar Alexander I personally founded the Society of Israelite Christians but had less luck defeating Judaism than he'd had defeating Napoleon; gentile serfs and merchants in areas bordering the Pale even showed disturbing new signs of 'Judaizing.'
When Czar Ivan III took a liking to the Judaizers, they were invited to Moscow, where they managed to convert so much of the court nobility in the last decades of the fifteenth century that traditionalists felt the need to counter the trend through selective burnings at the stake.
All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died after stabbing himself in the foot.
In early 1798, the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East.
There's nothing better than to be rootless cosmopolitans who seamlessly merge into whatever society. That's the greatest thing human beings can aspire to. Whether forced by duress, Jews became perfect modern human beings. After the Holocaust, one doesn't really mourn for that - it's too disturbing, seems like a mistake.
By comparison, 'The Secret Agent' is not especially prescient about terrorism, certainly not technically. The Professor was a stock figure of Edwardian fiction, and his dreams of mass destruction were nothing ahead of their time. Many novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved plots far more deadly.
The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary on so many levels that it's easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it: that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century.
Sugar planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century, and Saint-Domingue was the Ancien Regime's Wild West frontier, where sons of impoverished noble families could strike it rich.
The Jewish exodus from North Africa, in the late nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties, brought hundreds of thousands of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian Jews to France.
The French Revolution ends slavery unilaterally. And it does so at this moment when the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Americans - all of the other major powers - keep slavery. And the fact is that it's almost bankrupting the French Colonial Empire.
The French Revolution was a kind of 21st-century moment in the heart of the 18th century - and Alex Dumas, outstanding though he was, could never have risen the way he did if not for that. The French Revolution was the American Revolution on steroids.
It was nearly midnight on the night of February 26, 1806, and Alexandre Dumas, the future author of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' and 'The Three Musketeers,' was asleep at his uncle's house. He was not yet four years old. He was staying there because his father was gravely ill, and his mother thought it best for him not to be at home.
'The Secret Agent,' Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich - in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash - has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age.
Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio - two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party - insisted on being called liberal.
