I don’t think these pirates look much like Captain Jack Sparrow, though it might be more entertaining if they did.

Nah, it wouldn’t.

I was blown away by a recent notice from Simon & Schuster, publisher of my three books to date, reporting the number of pirated e-copies of my books that they have bullied off the Internet.

What’s your guess?

If you guessed eleven, you win.

Ten times, someone has posted free access to the text of Impeached, and once someone has posted the same for American Emperor.  Each time, according to Simon & Schuster, the hateful, disgusting thieves were threatened into taking down the books.  Two websites posted one of my books on four separate occasions apiece.  That doesn’t sound inadvertent, does it?

A partial set of the published volumes of Madison’s correspondence — only the ones I bought secondhand.

Bulletins from the frontiers of research:

• When it came to negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, American diplomats James Monroe and Robert Livingston sewed up the deal in a couple of weeks.  When it came to squabbling over credit, the two diplomats spent eighteen months writing backbiting letters to James Madison (Secretary of State) explaining in excrutiating detail how the other guy almost killed the deal and how the letter-writer singlehandedly saved the day.

King Richard III of England — the face of a monster?

After 500 years, we now know where the bones of King Richard III of England are.  They have been found under a parking lot in Leicester, England, near the site of the Battle of Bosworth where he was slain.

The evil genius of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard — hunchbacked, vicious, fiendish clever — was the literary ancestor of all those compelling villains who often upstage heroes:  think about Professor Moriarty, Darth Vader, even Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

We last left our hero in the Dallas library of Harlan Crow, admiring the paintings of three World War II leaders (Eisenhower, Churchill, and Hitler).  Outside the library, however, lurked even greater wonders:  a collection of gigantic statues of some of the 20th centuries most monstrous dictators, including –

• Lenin
• Stalin
• Mao Tse Tung
• Chou En-Lai

Some lesser figures are included, as well, such as Bela Kun of Hungary, Nicolae and Madame Ceausescu of Romania, Karl Marx, and Felix Dzerzhinsky.  The Dzerzhinsky is a special plum, as it used to stand in the lobby of the KGB headquarters at Lubyanka Prison, the spiritual home of Vladimir Putin.

While in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get a tour of the Harlan Crow Library, which is in Mr. Crow’s home.  It was an amazing treat.  After making our way past a couple of Charles Willson Peale portraits, we proceeded into his World War II room (or so I call it).

On one wall, two rather pedestrian landscapes by Dwight Eisenhower, from the honorable paint-by-numbers school.

On a two facing walls were paintings by Winston Churchill, one of which was really quite good (a Mediterranean hill town, somewhat impressionistic).

James Madison was a thoughtful fellow.  Very.  He and his pal Jefferson were amateur scientists, forever corresponding about their observations of natural phenomena or some new wacky theory coming out of those European know-it-alls.  Jefferson usually gets all the credit for being a renaissance man while Madison gets credit for being . . . short.

But Madison had some genuine ideas.  One that has been making the rounds of the blogosphere comes from his post-retirement speech to the agricultural society of Albemarle, Virginia in 1818.  In his (sadly) characteristically indirect, snarled-up and highly-qualified prose, he predicted the problem of climate change.