Another Steve Donoghue Q & A. As always, I put a question in.
War and Peace: This book has come up a lot on these Q & As, but I don't recall ever hearing your opinion on Tolstoy's view of history. (Apologies if I missed it.) Do great men shape history?
As luck would have it, my question was the first one answered on the video. So just start from the beginning, and my question will be there:
Steve didn't do what I was hoping that he would do, which was to engage more with War and Peace and talk about why he thinks Leo Tolstoy is wrong. (In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy spends a lot of pages arguing that individual people don't make history. Certain events, like the war between Russia and France, are bound to happen no matter who is in charge, and world leaders are nothing more than puppets of historical forces.) But oh well, win some, lose some.
I should perhaps make explicit that part of the reason I enjoy these Steve Donoghue Q&As so much is because they're a bit of a game. If you watch the whole Q&A, you'll quickly discover that all of the people asking questions want to get Steve to expand on their pet subject, but Steve's objective is to get through all the questions as quickly as possibly. But if you ask him a question that's too complex, then he gets upset and says that it's not appropriate for a rapid fire Q&A. (In his defense, he's got about 100 questions to work through, and his Q&As usually end up being 2 to 3 hours long, so you can't blame the guy.) But then, 1 out of every 5 questions or so will catch his interest, and you can get him talking for maybe 2 or 3 minutes. So the game is to try to pick a question that could be answered briefly, but also has the potential to engage him. It's very touch and go, but it's fun to try. I'm going to go away now and think about my next question for the next Q&A.
My previous forays into Steve Donoghue's Q&A are HERE, HERE and HERE. My review of War and Peace is HERE.
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