Tilting at windmills Cervantes wrote and published "Don Quixote" during the Eighty Years' War, or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), a revolt by the Habsburg Netherlands to end Spanish rule. In "Don Quixote", the eponymous protagonist consistently misinterprets the motives and actions of his adversaries and allies, and struggles to even understand his own at times — a conundrum regularly resulting in apparently unjustified violent actions and consequences. One way of interpreting Don Quixote's tilting at windmills could be allegorically, thereby promoting critical, skeptical, or satirical evaluation of either a hero's motives, rationales and actions, or the ultimate aims of a nation's foreign
Windmills of the Gods Windmills of the Gods Windmills of the Gods is a 1987 thriller novel by American writer Sidney Sheldon. Mary Ashley, a professor at Kansas State University, is offered an ambassadorship by Paul Ellison, the US president. She rejects the offer because her husband, Dr. Edward Ashley, does not want to leave his medical practice, and she is not willing to be separated from him. She also feels that it is harder to find a good doctor for a small Kansas town than an ambassador to a foreign country. When her husband suddenly dies in a suspicious traffic accident, Ashley accepts