On a recent bright, muggy morning in Manhattan, the screenwriter David Franzoni was reclining in a low-slung chair in the tapestry-strewn barroom at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, across from Central Park, talking about history. Franzoni, who writes big clanging period pictures like"Gladiator" and"Amistad," was wearing jeans, an open-collared shirt and a loose jacket, and waving about a mop of thick black-gray hair (the last time he seems to have put a comb to it was when he accepted the Oscar for"Gladiator").

He was cursing copiously. Reverence was nowhere in sight. Everything was up for revision.

Franzoni on former presidents:"Jefferson -- what a jerk that guy was. Jefferson was an animal." Years ago Franzoni wrote a biopic of George Washington in which he dismantles the third president.

Franzoni on famous battles of yore:"So I'm beginning to think maybe Scipio actually got the crap kicked out of him at Carthage." He is working on a script about the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who is commonly thought to have lost to Scipio.

On the Greatest Generation:"I can't find any stories I like in World War II." And Camelot:"These guys were the Wild Bunch, not some shiny little cans of metal cruising around the countryside rescuing bored housewives from distress. These guys were killers."

Franzoni, who is 55, was especially animated on this last topic. He was in New York for the premiere of"King Arthur," his latest film, a $100-million-plus Jerry Bruckheimer-produced retelling of the legend of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Lerner & Loewe this is not:"I like to think about these knights as guys who came back from 'Nam. My description to Jerry was 'The fall of Saigon, the last chopper's on top of the embassy and they have to go, and these guys can't get out. They have to go up to the DMZ for one more run. Merlin's Ho Chi Minh, up there with his Viet Cong. We don't have him flying through the air talking to chipmunks.'"

Living the paradox of Hollywood's muckety-muck screenwriters, Franzoni, for all his clout, has seen his name in the credits of only a few films over his 25-year career, so premieres are always exciting for him. He'd brought along his wife and son, with whom he lives in Malibu.

Still, he was bothered. Disney had just cut"Arthur" to get a PG-13 rating, and he had no idea what the new print looked like."Here's what [ticks] me off about PG-13 -- you don't see the blood. You have people dying like in old Ronald Reagan movies again -- gloriously. PG-13 is like this '50s lobotimization of kids again. So a kid is from Iraq, and his family's been killed and he's lost a leg -- can he see an R-rated film?"

Lost legs -- this is how Franzoni sees history. His characters, when they're not busy being shackled in chains or declaiming on the rights of man, are usually dismembering each other. Franzoni believes that Arthur, for instance, was not a chivalrous medieval king but rather a tragic Roman mercenary with a weakness for humanist philosophy whose lot it was to be stuck in Britain while his empire fell around him. Assorted British cultural groups are objecting to the portrayal, as are some historians.

"The Celts despise our theory. We have a Celtic advisor on board, and he's always under fire." Franzoni was taking it in stride."Historians -- they're just drunk idiots in tweed." He likes to take a fatalist's view. In his eyes, America, like the Rome of"Gladiator," is an empire in decline."Ultimately we're going to fall," he said."This Patriot Act is the tenuous beginnings of the erosion of free speech. Rome fell -- it took a long time. We're going there, but it's a slow process. CNN was taken over by the Caesars a long time ago. You're not getting anything out of these people."

Franzoni may get his fascination with war from his father, a veteran who owned several companies, a gun maker among them, in Vermont, where Franzoni grew up. As a kid, he watched John Ford and Roger Corman movies."One night I stayed up really late, and 'All Quiet on the Western Front' was on. And I remember it was like I was hit with a hammer."

He studied paleontology at the University of Vermont and after college traveled to Germany, where he bought a cheap motorcycle. He rode it across Europe and western Asia. In Baghdad, he traded a book on the Irish Revolution with a traveling companion in return for"Those About to Die," a book about the Roman games. He was in thrall."The Romans had this unique vision of themselves -- they were born monsters and proud of it.

"Somewhere in India I decided I wanted to be a screenwriter," he added....

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you all very much. Thank you for that warm welcome. And, General, thank you very much for that introduction.

It's always great to see General Kelley, a man who has given so many years of dedicated service to America. Of course, now he's retired from active duty. But you don't want to make the mistake of calling him an ex-Marine - - there is no such thing. And, of course, P. X. is someone I'm very proud to call a friend, he is a great American. General, I want to thank you for the honor you do us today by being here with all of us. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

It's good to be back in New Orleans, and I bring you greetings from our Commander-in-Chief, President George W. Bush. (Applause.)

I'm also pleased to have the opportunity once again to visit the National D-Day Museum. The museum, of course, was founded by one of our nation's great historians, Stephen Ambrose. He was a friend. I was delighted to know him. And this place, as Dr. Ambrose once said, is the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to World War II, and the only museum in the world that has as its central theme one day in the world's history, but what a day that was.

Last month, President Bush traveled to Normandy for the ceremonies that marked the 60th anniversary of D-Day. It was a moment to remember those who turned the tide of war in freedom's favor -- the heroes whose memories you keep alive, and whose achievements you celebrate, here in this museum each day.

The courage of America's World War II generation is now inspiring a new generation of Americans to lives of service in our nation's armed forces. At this hour, many thousands of those brave men and women are standing watch for freedom in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. And like so many others who have served America in uniform, these young Americans are making this nation very proud. (Applause.)

The challenges we face in today's war on terror are different from those our countrymen faced six decades ago. Today's enemies send trained killers to live among us and attack civilians from within our own borders. They strike us not with tanks, but by taking the tools of everyday life -- aircraft, trucks and cars -- and turning them into weapons to kill innocent men, women and children.

We face a threat today unlike any our nation has ever known. Still, we can find parallels between this war and the struggle against tyranny in the 1940s. In that era, as in our own, our nation experienced a sudden attack that took many lives. Then, as now, our country responded by going on the offensive against freedom's enemies -- in Asia, in Africa, in Europe and around the globe. Then, as now, free nations came together to overthrow cruel dictators, and to liberate people suffering brutal oppression. Then, as now, our country faced the difficult challenge of reconstruction, as American GIs helped nations reclaim their sovereignty and build free societies.

It was not easy then. It is not easy now. Yet because America and our allies were steadfast, Germany and Japan became successful democracies and strong allies of the United States. And today, because a new generation of heroes has stepped forward to serve, Iraq and Afghanistan are making steady progress on the path to democracy and self-reliance. And we will see this mission through. (Applause.)

This week, only 15 months after the liberation of Iraq, we reached an important milestone, as the world witnessed the arrival of a free and sovereign Iraqi government. Iraqis saw a peaceful transfer of power take place in Baghdad, as Prime Minister Allawi and his Cabinet took full governing responsibility for their nation.

Before the transfer of sovereignty, another remarkable and unprecedented event took place: Iraq's new transitional administrative law was approved, a law that guarantees individual rights never known in the history of Iraq and still rare in the Middle East. Discrimination based on gender, nationality, and religion is expressly prohibited. Today, by law, every Iraqi man, woman and child is guaranteed freedom of religion; freedom of speech; the right to assemble peacefully; the right to organize political parties, the right to choose their leaders in free elections; and the right to a fair trial, with equal justice under the law. As I was on my way to the museum today, I couldn't help but think of my last visit here on April 9, 2003. That was the same day that Saddam Hussein's statue came down in Baghdad. (Applause.) Today, 15 months later, Saddam Hussein stands arraigned in an Iraqi court, where he will face the justice he denied to millions. (Applause.)

It is a historic transformation for that nation -- 15 months ago, it was under the absolute control of a dictator. With the assumption of power by the Iraqi interim government, and the enshrining of these rights in law, Iraq is now a country where the government will answer to the people, instead of the other way around. This is a proud moment for the United States, as well. Acting with capable allies at our side, we pledged to end a dangerous regime, to free the oppressed, and to restore sovereignty to the Iraqi people. And we have kept our word....

Geoffrey Roberts, in the Irish Times (June 24, 2004):

The 60th anniversary of D-Day has once again highlighted the contribution of Irish volunteers in the British armed forces to the allied victory.

The best estimate is that some 70,000 citizens of the Irish Free State served in the British forces during the war, together with 50,000 from Northern Ireland.

This was half the number that enlisted in Ireland during the first World War, with, thankfully, only 5,000 fatalities, compared to the 30,000 who died in the trenches. But the southern Irish enlistment was a significant contribution from the citizens of a small, neutral state.

On this, as on previous anniversaries, the Irish media lauded the service and sacrifice of the Irish volunteers of the second World War. There was general agreement that the volunteers were fighting for Ireland as well as Britain, and that the allied victory safeguarded Irish freedom and independence.

As this paper's editorial said of the volunteers: "All of us on this island owe them a debt of gratitude" (June 4th).

But there remains an unfinished debate about the Irish State's neutrality during the war.

In his column on the anniversary weekend, Martin Mansergh rehearsed the arguments for Irish neutrality (June 5th). Neutrality protected a largely defenceless state from the horrors of war, and maintained national unity when participation on the allied side would have been deeply divisive, says Mr Mansergh. A neutral Ireland, he argued, was more beneficial to the Allies than an additional front to be defended, especially when Northern Ireland was providing the necessary military bases.

He attempts to defuse the debate about Ireland's neutrality by suggesting that it is all right to be both enthusiastic for the allied cause and proud of Irish neutrality. As he points out, most of the Irish volunteers - including the southern Protestants - supported Ireland's neutrality. As Denis Johnston, who served as a BBC war correspondent, wrote in his diary in 1942: "It is my belief in Ireland's neutrality that has so largely sent me forth. Only those prepared to go into this horrible thing themselves have the right to say that Ireland must stay out."

There are powerful strategic and political arguments in favour of Irish neutrality. As de Valera argued at the time, when small states involve themselves in major wars they put at risk their very existence, and they control neither the course of the war nor the peace that follows. It also is true that neutrality was a popular, unifying policy, which cemented the identity and loyalty of the citizens of the 26-county Irish State.

The problem with this defence of neutrality is threefold.

First, the difficulties entailed by Irish participation in the war should not be allowed to obscure the moral and political issue confronting the country. Both national interest and morality demanded the defeat of Nazi barbarism. But the Irish State kept equal distance from all the combatants. Even when the war was over, de Valera refrained from publicly endorsing the justice of the allied cause.

The amorality of Irish wartime neutrality was summed up by de Valera's infamous visit to the German ambassador in Dublin in April 1945 to present his condolences on the death of Hitler.

As Robert Fisk said, "morally, it was both senseless and deeply wounding to the millions who had suffered in the war; politically, it could have been disastrous. But symbolically, it could not be misunderstood: Eire had not accepted the values of the warring nations and did not intend to do so in the future."

Second, while the case for maintaining Irish neutrality in the early years of the war was very strong, it made less sense as the war progressed. In 1941 the Soviet Union and the US entered the war. In 1942 the tide of the war began to turn in favour of the Allies.

The military danger to Ireland was now minimal, and there were opportunities to participate in the allied struggle at relatively low risk, or at the very least to modify the neutrality policy towards the allies.

This was a choice exercised by a number of neutral states during the war. Indeed, the great allied coalition of 1945 was largely made up of formerly neutral states. Any change in the policy of neutrality would have meant internal political difficulties for the Irish State. But the opportunity to effect a gradual shift in policy towards the allies did exist.

De Valera's failure to countenance such a course of action was informed more by party politics than the national interest. His main concern was the split in Fianna Fail that would occur if neutrality was abandoned. More importantly, de Valera's priorities were domestic rather than international.

Third, wartime neutrality cost the country dearly in the post-war years. For North-South relations, neutrality was a disaster. Neutrality reinforced partition, strengthened unionist rule in Ulster and ensured the post-war isolation of the northern Catholic community....

Richard Garner, in the Independent (June 27, 2004):

Robert Harris, the best-selling author of historical thrillers, called on history teachers yesterday to embrace the techniques of novelists and television dramatists to bring the subject to life.

Speaking at a gathering of eminent historians, writers and teachers brought together by the Prince of Wales, the author of Fatherland and Enigma said: "We should restore the importance of the narrative when we approach the subject. The human brain latches on to stories, not disjointed facts. Students also have empathy with historical characters - get them to imagine being in a particular place at a particular time and they will understand it better than restricting themselves entirely to the facts."

The annual royal "summer school", held this year at Buxton, also heard from Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, who said that current history lessons are neglecting the slave trade and its part in the rise of Liverpool as the second trading city in Britain.

He called for more emphasis on the teaching of British ethnic groups' contribution to UK history to promote better integration.

"What we don't do enough of is to refer to where we have been," he said. "We should be teaching them about their role in British history."

Niall Ferguson, a former Oxford don and presenter of a Channel 4 series on the history of the British Empire, claimed too much concentration on "Hitler and the Henrys" had dealt a massive blow to students' understanding of history. He said too many schools were choosing the same options for exam study - Hitler, or the history of the Tudors and Stuarts....

George Cotkin, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (July 2, 2004):

The state of cultural criticism today, in the view of many, is debilitated, perhaps even moribund. For Birkerts, Alvin Kiernan, Russell Jacoby, and others, there once existed a lively, deep, public, and engaged cultural criticism. Great critics -- Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg, Alfred Kazin, and Dwight Macdonald -- roamed the roadways of criticism, stopping to dispense sage or impassioned judgments and to uphold standards. What happened?

According to this line of thought, our present generation of cultural critics, arriving after the assault of postmodernism and the increasingly widespread commercialization of culture, has been cast adrift, without any firm basis for judgments. Publications and institutions to support serious criticism, in this view, either no longer exist or are few in number.

Critics today, it is also claimed, are too cozy behind the ivied walls of academe, content to employ a prose style that is decipherable only to a handful of the cognoscenti. The deadly dive of university critics into the shallow depths of popular culture, moreover, reveals the unwillingness of these critics to uphold standards. Even if the reasons offered are contradictory, these Jeremiahs huddle around their sad conclusion that serious cultural criticism has fallen into a morass of petty bickering and bloated reputations.

Such narratives of declension, a staple of American intellectual life since the time of the Puritans, are misplaced, self-serving, and historically inaccurate. And difficult to prove. Has the level of criticism declined in the last 50 years? Have we toppled from the urbane and learned heights of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson into the cesspool of literary assassination or mere description? Of course the logic of such an opinion depends on the figures that are being contrasted with one another. Any number of cultural critics thriving today could be invoked to demonstrate that cultural criticism is alive and well.

Consider, for example, a comparison between the sainted Trilling and the ubiquitous Harold Bloom. Birkerts and others praise Trilling for his accessible style, his willingness to place his literary criticism at the"dark and bloody crossroads" where literature and criticism meet. Not only did Trilling revere the university and the ideals of humanism, but he also sought to reach out to the general public, through his activities with"high-brow" book clubs and with his famous anthology of literature, The Experience of Literature.

Yet Bloom, who is alive and kicking, has deeply influenced the study of literature in the academy with his ideas about"anxiety of influence." Most recently, in The Best Poems in the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, he has continued his effort to make serious literature available to a wider public. Lest one respond that Trilling published a novel, well, so has Bloom. Finally, Trilling's political engagement, over all, was relatively limited and often abstract. Sometimes his single-minded animus to radicalism in the 1940s clouded his political judgments and commitments. Bloom, rather than being a reclusive academic, has entered heartily into the cultural wars, however much one may or may not approve of his opinions.

Is Bloom part of a vanishing breed of public intellectual? In fact, today's media outlets teem with public intellectuals....

David Waldstreicher, in Common-Place.org (July 2004):

Alan Taylor has remarked upon a certain trend in the recent profusion of books on the Founders. As the reputations of some, like John Adams, are raised, others are condemned. History becomes a parody of Wall Street: a bull market for Hamilton means it is time to sell your stock in Thomas Jefferson.

When the controversial matter of slavery in the nation’s past is added to the mix, the results can be still more dubious. Recently we have seen the emergence of Benjamin Franklin, champion of freedom, and opponent of all forms of slavery. ...

Oddly enough, the antislavery Franklin is claimed not only by both sides of the slavery-and-the-Founders debate, but also by those who, wisely enough, try to mediate between them. Joseph J. Ellis, for example, emphasized the bad faith of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on slavery only to hold up Franklin’s antislavery credentials—his presidency of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1787 and his prominent signature on a petition presented to the first Federal Congress—as the jewel in the Founders’ crown. Meanwhile, the most forthright recent critic of the Founders on the slavery question justified his harsh judgment of Jefferson in light of the fact that Franklin"believed in racial equality." A prominent scholar of race and the law in U.S. history argued, in an op-ed piece, against the erasure of history involved in a New Orleans school’s decision to give up the name of George Washington because he owned slaves. It is important to remember, she wrote, that Washington had a better record on slavery than Jefferson, adding that"some contemporaries of Washington like Benjamin Franklin and John Quincy Adams were against slavery and did not own slaves."

When the views of Franklin of the 1780s, Washington of the 1790s, and John Quincy Adams of the 1830s are all conflated to oppose a timeless Jefferson on the question of slavery, the notion of Founders and foundings departs history and enters the realm of myth. Certainly the notion of a founding"generation" means very little if it stretches the entire fifty-nine years from the Declaration of Independence to the Amistad case. And, in what seems a curious sort of founding grandfather complex, what matters most is what great men did in their old age when they were already known to be great.

Beneath the mythologizing, however, the story of Franklin and slavery is considerably more complex. Indeed, one could argue that Jefferson did more to undermine slavery during the era of the American Revolution than did Franklin. While the Pennsylvanian was busy blaming the British for slavery, the Virginian pushed for the end of the international slave trade and gradual emancipation in Virginia and almost succeeded in closing the Northwest territories to slave owners. Insofar as they acted as contemporaries, Franklin and Jefferson converged in the writing of the original draft Declaration, with its simultaneous indictment of slavery, blame of England, and outrage at the king’s enlistment of slaves. ...

James Hershberg, associate professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, in the Wash Post (June 27, 2004):

... Ronald Reagan's policies surely contributed to the dissolution of the Kremlin's empire, culminating in the 1989 anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union two years later. But for the media and Reagan's hagiographers to give the 40th president all the credit is like saying a late-inning relief pitcher had"won" a baseball game without mentioning the starting pitcher, the closer or the teammates who scored the runs that gave the team its lead.

Historians abhor the idea of attributing a vast, complex phenomenon to a single cause. No one person brought down the Soviet Union, but if I had to choose the one who mattered most, that person would not be Reagan, most of whose policies fit comfortably in the Cold War tradition of containment followed dutifully by presidents from Truman to Carter.

Rather, the historical wild card was Mikhail Gorbachev, who followed a well-worn path up the ladder of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union -- and then turned out to be a radical reformer. Influenced by Nikita Khrushchev's short-lived"thaw" in the 1950s, Gorbachev grasped long before Reagan's election that the stultifying Soviet system required renovation. Gorbachev also committed the heresy of abandoning the aim of world revolution and the class struggle in international affairs in favor of amorphous, but much nicer,"universal human values." Above all, he refused to use the massive armed forces at his disposal to retain his party's grip on captive nations in Eastern Europe, restive nationalist republics or Russia itself -- something his predecessors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko might have readily done had they not conked out first.

But Gorbachev cannot claim all the credit, either. The factors that doomed the Soviet Union were largely innate, not external. In his seminal 1947"X" article in Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan argued"that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced." In early 1950, despite anxiety over the first Soviet atomic explosion, the communist victory in China and the rise of McCarthyism, Harvard University President James B. Conant predicted that by 1980 the Soviets'"absurdities and static system would cause them to grind to a stop." He wasn't far off.

Reagan essentially followed a bipartisan legacy of containment. Sure, he offered arms to anti-communist insurgencies in the Third World and fervently articulated his beliefs in freedom and democracy, but so had other presidents. In the crunch, Reagan was (understandably) no more willing to risk World War III by directly challenging Kremlin repression in Central Europe than his predecessors had been. For all the claims of clandestine aid to the banned Solidarity movement in Poland, Reagan's reaction -- rhetoric, sympathy and half-hearted sanctions -- to the Warsaw regime's imposition of martial law in December 1981 was no less tepid than Eisenhower's to Soviets' violent suppression of revolts in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956), Kennedy's to the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961), or Johnson's to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968).

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" -- Reagan's iconic 1987 challenge in Berlin -- made a nice sound bite. But however stirring his words, Europeans living under communist rule knew from bitter experience that neither the American cavalry nor American presidential rhetoric was going to liberate them....

Reagan admirers assert that the 1980s U.S. military buildup bankrupted the Kremlin."By building our defenses -- rather than unleashing aggression -- Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union," former Republican senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole declared in the New York Times. Politburo minutes indicate a genuine (albeit unfounded) concern about the"Star Wars" missile defense program, and sharper Soviet leaders grasped the growing disparity between the military and technological sophistication of the West, especially the United States, and that of the U.S.S.R. This intensified Gorbachev's desire to ease Cold War enmity, gain greater access to Western goods and know-how, and reallocate resources from the military to the civilian economy.

But Gorbachev also saw the absurdity of a nuclear arms race that, by the mid-1980s, had led the superpowers to hoard more than 70,000 warheads. He understood that he could make appealing offers to jump-start talks -- allowing on-site inspections or trading away intermediate range missiles -- without sacrificing the Soviet nuclear deterrent.

Thus the 1980s arms race did not cause the Kremlin's collapse. The Soviet economy was rotting from within for many other reasons. The Kremlin's warped priorities -- maintaining a cumbersome military machine while its economy and living standards lagged behind the West's -- helped implode the Soviet empire. But those priorities had been set for decades. The turning point was not Reagan's rise but Stalin's chutzpah after World War II. With his country devastated, the vozhd (boss) opted to seek nuclear weapons ("on a Russian scale") and coequal superpower status. From then on, the military consumed the"best and brightest" of Soviet science and distorted the economy.

The focus on the military also shortchanges the role that soft power played in the Soviet realm's demise. The trillions of dollars the West spent on weapons and containment ultimately proved less significant than aspects of Western life that had nothing to do with government policies -- music, movies, fashion (blue jeans!), consumer goods,"Coca-Colonization," and the prospect of a freer, tastier and more affluent life....

"Oswald Spengler," the pseudonym of a columnist, in Asia Times (June 22, 2004):

For serious devotees of torture, Washington's embarrassment about Abu Ghraib paled beside the Vatican's defense last week of the Spanish Inquisition. It turns out, reported church officials at a June 15 press conference, that the Spanish Inquisition burnt at the stake less than 1% of the 125,000 accused heretics brought before it. On the strength of this statistic they qualified Pope John Paul II's previous apology for the Inquisition."A request for forgiveness can only refer to facts that are true and objectively recognized. One does not ask forgiveness for some impressions widely held by public opinion, which contain more myth than reality," said Cardinal Georges Cottier.

Catholic publicists in possession of these data have been campaigning to rescue the Inquisition's good name from the besmirchment of Protestant propaganda. Wrote Prof Thomas F Madden of St Louis University in October 2003:"The Spanish people loved their Inquisition. That is why it lasted for so long."

Silly as he sounds, Prof Madden is quite right. In fact, I have been defending the Spanish Inquisition for years, most recently in a comment on March 16, 2004 (Spain's elections show why radical Islam can win). People do nasty things not because they are negligent or bloody-minded, but rather because they cannot avoid doing them. That is why we call such things tragic. Spain's inquisitors were not the horror-movie sadists of popular myth, but sad little functionaries seeking to prevent the sort of religious war that plagued Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Not the boorish Germans but rather the agile Latins first opened the Pandora's Box of religious reform. If we accept that Spain's Inquisition was tragic rather than arbitrary, we must - I believe - also reach the conclusion that Christianity can flourish only on the American model. Neither Catholic empire nor the Protestant nation-state could do anything except destroy itself. But this is to get ahead of the story; we have only just tugged at the loose thread.

Before it burned heretics, the Spanish Inquisition burned books. Only one leaf remains of Bonifacio Ferrer's 1478 Spanish translation of the Bible, for the Inquisition hunted down every copy printed. Bible reading, they knew led to Protestantism, and Protestantism led to religious war.

Then the Inquisition hunted down Jews, for Jews knew Hebrew, and might teach it to Protestants who then might translate the Bible (which happened in Luther's Germany). As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, the Inquisition sought to prevent the"Judaizing of all of Spain", that is, the spread of Protestantism, and thus persuaded the Catholic monarchs to expel the Jews in 1492.

Was the Spanish Inquisition wrong? On the contrary. Religious war devastated France during the 16th century, and during the 17th century reduced the population of Germany by more than half. England's Civil War shed less blood, but left its business unfinished. Cavalier and Roundhead diehards emigrated respectively to Virginia and Massachusetts, sowing the seeds of America's devastating Civil War 200 years later (see David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 book Albion’s Seed).

Not until 1936 did the lid blow off, and Spain fought a long-delayed religious war between Catholicism and Atheism, in which the firing squad claimed more than a fifth of the estimated half-million violent deaths. The Spanish Civil War reduced a formerly martial nation to the feckless, infertile hedonists of today whose only claim to fame is the world's lowest birthrate. It was not always so.

Thanks to the Inquisition, the likes of Luther and Calvin got all the credit for the Reformation, but there is reason to believe that given a chance, the Spanish variant would have been far more intrepid. ...

With right the Vatican may defend the record of the Spanish Inquisition, but it alters not a jot or tittle of the awful sentence - oblivion - that history has passed upon European Christianity.

Back in the days when it was socially important to keep up appearances -- of a happy marriage, a happy home, being happy-go-lucky -- everyone, it seemed, looked smashing. Before the now common public confessional, one's peccadilloes were swept under the rug and unorthodox behavior was engaged in discreetly. People worked hard to present a perfect veneer. Fashion was complicit in constructing that facade.

In the new movie"De-Lovely," about the life of composer Cole Porter and his wife, Linda, clothes serve as an apt metaphor for impossibly perfect glamour hiding complicated, troubled souls. In the film, which opens July 2, the Porters cut dashing figures on the social circuit. Yet their smooth, glib surface camouflages a private life that is painful and rocky. Cole Porter is gay, but he nevertheless marries Linda and creates -- for a time -- a happy home that holds the promise of children. Linda understands that Cole is gay, but the marriage satisfies them both in ways that are not sexual. Marriage offers them companionship, support, love and purpose.

Any cinematic tale needs drama, however, and the Porters oblige. He becomes increasingly indiscreet in his affairs. She becomes frustrated that the delicate balance of their lives is being destroyed. She has a miscarriage. He becomes a drunk. But all the while, they look splendid.

Costume designer Janty Yates crafted the look of the Porters as played by Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd. She turned to the designer Giorgio Armani for help. Although the film focuses on the years from the 1920s to the 1960s, the fashions are rooted in the '30s and '40s, decades when everyone looked particularly swell. This is a film that gives elegance as much importance as historical accuracy. And although Armani has contributed to a host of recent films such as"Shaft" and"Hannibal," not since"The Untouchables" in 1987 has a film benefited so profoundly from his aesthetic.

" 'The Untouchables' was the first period film I worked on and it taught me that I am really not a costume designer. I can only work on projects which lend themselves to my aesthetic. . . . Though the film was set during Prohibition, the look was my interpretation of what the style of the time was," Armani says in an e-mail."The same can be said of 'De-Lovely,' a film where the action spans the '20s, '30s and '40s. I love this period of fashion -- it was a time when people really dressed up in an elegant manner. However, I am not a fashion historian, nor am I interested in re-creating the past. Instead, I have done outfits which have the spirit of elegance of the time, but are updated with modern touches."

Yates, who worked with Armani on"Hannibal," was responsible for striking a balance between what was appropriate for the time and what is pleasing to modern eyes. For example, many of Linda Porter's evening clothes were pulled directly from the Armani archives and used with only subtle changes.

"Mr. Armani nearly always makes his evening wear in a slipper satin silk, so because of that we were halfway there. He cuts on the bias, so we were three-quarters there," Yates says in a telephone interview."In a couple of dresses, he took out the zipper and put in buttons and took out elastic and put in ribbon."

Both of the Porters had a distinctive style, and for once, the gentleman's fashion sense is not overshadowed by the woman's. He was a theatrical dresser, almost always wearing a suit and never dressing down."Cole Porter always had a flower in his lapel. He would always, always go for a fresh flower and would go after an unusual flower. We were always looking for purple flowers and dark green flowers," Yates says.

Armani tailored all of Kline's clothing. This was a period when even the most dissolute man would button himself up in an extravagant suit. And even when Porter's shadowy dalliances were becoming more reckless, he sartorially presented himself as composed, controlled and confident. There is a scene in which Porter wears a white suit as he prepares to depart from Venice. He looks supremely elegant. Yet is there a man alive today who can wear a white suit and not look as though he should be an airport lounge singer? During a rehearsal for one of his musicals, Porter sits cross-legged on the floor in a beautifully cut gray suit with a red flower in his lapel. Are there still men who can simultaneously be so relaxed while dressed up?

The '30s, says Armani, was"an era of great tailoring." The clothes were in service to the wearer....