Back in January, we told you about the alleged tempest in Penguin’s teapot over the book jacket for former Republican House whip Tom DeLay‘s memoir, No Retreat, No Surrender. The Bruce Springsteen allusion in the title completely eluded me somehow when the story first broke, but ABC News caught the reference, and makes a little hay with it, considering that John Kerry used the same song in his failed presidential campaign.
According to a DeLay staffer, though, the title of his book doesn’t have anything to do with rock music. Spokesman Shannon Flaherty offers a counterexplanation by citing the #1 movie in America, 300, which does in fact include a scene where King Leonidas cites that phrase as Spartan law. But since the movie’s only been out a week, and the title of the book’s been known for months, somebody with more time and a better-stocked classical library than me is going to have to recheck Herodotus, because that phrase isn’t ringing a bell with my hazy college-days recall of The Histories, and it’s going to really, really weird if it turns out that DeLay nicked his title from graphic novelist Frank Miller.