Hugo Münsterberg’s 1916 The Film: A Psychological Study sent this narrative into orbit. Where it was shot at by Martian paratroopers holding my ideas hostage. A prescient man, he paraphrases Noel Burch’s To the Distant Observer sixty years before it was written. I hope Münsterberg would like that in 2008 we’re still discussing his heart’s desire, Annette Kellerman.

World War I: How We Advertised America by George Creel; American Indians in World War I by Thomas A. Britten; The Hawks That Guided the Guns by Lawrence Smart; The History of the 135th by Percival Hart.

Dogs: James English’s The Story of Rin Tin Tin and The Spirit of Rin Tin Tin by Allan Shields. Harry seems to have read the wonderful/horrifying The German Shepherd Dog in Words & Pictures by von Stephanitz. I highly recommend watching Where the North Begins, Rinty’s first feature. Based on an idea by Lee Duncan, it’s weird, dopey, melodramatic, and, when the dog is onscreen, it’s wonderful. Rinty was popular not just because he was cute but because he could act.

Archangel: There are more than a dozen histories in English about the Allied intervention. But it remains a war about which we are largely ignorant. That ill-equipped Americans died in a war that was unnecessary and ill-advised, for confused goals and shifting political reasons in a foreign land among people who largely wished them to leave, should be the kind of thing found only in a novel. Probably the best single-volume book on the subject is The Day They Almost Bombed Moscow by Christopher Dobson and John Miller. Quartered in Hell by Dennis Gordon gives an overview of the troops’ many miseries. Ignorant Armies by E. M. Halliday is a good read, though it dates from the 1960s. I hope that an updated popular history becomes available.

The mutiny of the Slavo-British Legion, as portrayed in this novel, collapses together details of several different mutinies. In his memoirs, Ironside looks away at the mutineers’ fates, or claims that they were rehabilitated. Other eyewitness accounts, however, describe the immediate execution of the leaders.

Ironside: There is no full-length biography of this astonishing man, who shows up at key moments of British rule from the 1900s to World War II. Shortly after Archangel, he helped partition Iraq, which he took to with cunning and diplomacy. I recommend John Buchan’s The 39 Steps and the follow-up adventures of his hero Richard Hannay, who was based on Ironside.

To paraphrase Thomas Mallon, nouns trump adjectives, so you can guess how an author’s dice are weighted if he writes historical fiction. To that end, some quotations here are real, others are not; many are amalgams. Thank you in advance to The New Republic for being such good sports.