Responding To A Text

Everyone must be able to say or write something about a text that they have read. Currently, I am reading The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and SM Stirling both in order to appreciate novels by these authors and in order to compare Pournelle's CoDominium future history with Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization. So far, posts, comments and discussion have been occasioned by:

a description of natural beauty;
accounts of meals;
two Latin phrases;
the name, "Marius";
the single words, "war" and "revolution";
the phrases, "Grand Survey" and "welfare state";
an account of a street demonstration;
kinds of military sf;
the use of dates in future histories -

- but there is a lot more in these novels, mainly reflections on military theory and history with quotations from real texts as well as from fictitious ones. What happened with Gorbachev is belatedly incorporated into the build-up to the CoDominium. Thus, another reader will no doubt respond to very different words, phrases, ideas and issues in the same texts. This is an invitation to blog readers to publish their responses to these novels in the combox.