Free Republic

First published in 1726, Jonathan Swift's adventure novel has been chopped, changed and adapted ever since. Is it a "misanthropic satire" or a "fantastical nursery tale"? You may be familiar with the story of Lemuel Gulliver. He wakes up after a shipwreck only to be pinned down by ropes and surrounded by tiny Lilliputians, who clamber up to the incapacitated adventurer. It's a scene that's been replicated and satirised ever since Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, 300 years ago. Yet fewer may know of Gulliver's darker exploits, where the voyaging anti-hero encounters scientists inserting bellows into dogs,...

WASHINGTON - Is United States foreign policy being run by followers of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher whose views were elitist, amoral and hostile to democratic government? Suddenly, political Washington is abuzz about Leo Strauss, who arrived in the US in 1938 and taught at several major universities before his death in 1973. Following recent articles in the US press, and as reported in Asia Times Online This war is brought to you by ... in March, the cognoscenti are becoming aware that key neoconservative strategists behind the Bush administration's aggressive foreign and military policy consider themselves to be...