While browsing through the bookstores of Oxford last month (much as I love Amazon.com and my Kindle, no on-line bookstore has yet reproduced the experience of wandering through a great bookstore as random titles catch your eye), I ran across the kind of book I love: a big fat paperback narrative history.  It's been a guilty pleasure ever since; I spend time reading this that ought to go toward reading for the five capsule reviews I owe Foreign Affairs in a couple of weeks. War of Wars by Robert Harvey is 926 pages of old fashioned narrative history about the...