Momus, the Greek god of satire, was expelled from Mount Olympus for his sharp-tongued criticism. He wasn't much more popular down here among... Read More
On the college campus where I have been living, the students dress in a style I do not understand. Continuous with what we wore fifteen... Read More
he past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the Frankfurt School – a group of German sociologists, philosophers, cultural... Read More
When I was in graduate school, I had the good fortune to hear Eric Hobsbawm lecture on nationalism. The year was 1992. Hobsbawm had just... Read More
On Feb. 14, 1961, Vasily Grossman's novel “Life and Fate” was arrested. K.G.B. agents confiscated several copies of the... Read More
The success of the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park during World War II has become legendary. The technological challenges they faced... Read More
British politics on the eve of the Second World War remains a subject of enduring fascination. Recent years have witnessed the publication of... Read More
Thumb through the program for the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies and you'll spot the usual suspects: Beowulf, King Arthur,... Read More
Lovers of Ernest Hemingway's work will thrill to the paperback release of “Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and... Read More
For a total of ten months spread over fifteen years, Jane Austen visited her brother Edward Austen Knight at his Kent estate. The... Read More
In the opening scene of Rabbit, Run (1960), John Updike's second published novel, the twenty-six-year-old Harry Angstrom –... Read More
Are smartphones a blessing or a curse? When you are in a restaurant and observe four people around a table not speaking to one another, their... Read More
By suspending the normal rules of earth-bound weight and motion, swimming pools bend certain rules of mental operation too, presenting... Read More
LONDON — In 2004, years before he was poised to become Britain's next prime minister, Boris Johnson published “Seventy-Two... Read More
Recently, at a lunch with a group of graduate students, conversation turned to American colonial history, then to John Winthrop's 1630 speech... Read More
I only recently read “The Fable of the Bees,” a poem by Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), a Dutch physician living in... Read More
Thomas Williams spends a decent chunk of the introduction to his new translation of St. Augustine's Confessions justifying its... Read More
Some books are classics and deserve to remain in print. Such is the case with Christopher Hollis's A Study of George Orwell: The... Read More
IN APRIL 2008, Robert M. Gates, secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, asserted that the national security community... Read More
On an early winter's morning in 1945, four months after the end of the Second World War, a shabbily dressed man in his late 50s walked into... Read More
While studying in the School of Oriental and African Studies library a few years ago, I stumbled across Xu Guoqi's China and the Great... Read More
In 1776, most of what is now New Mexico and its surrounding region belonged to New Spain. The area to the north and west toward the Pacific... Read More
Hollywood has never lacked for luxurious hotels or restaurants. Stars that are in town to shoot a film have a choice of opulent homes to... Read More
Andrew Johnson: A BiographyBy Hans L. Trefousse (1989)1. President Abraham Lincoln's choice of Andrew Johnson as his 1864 running mate may rank as the most ill-fated attempt at ticket-balancing in U.S. history. Lincoln's April 1865 assassination left the new vice president to “bind up the nation's wounds,” a task for which this thin-skinned Jacksonian Democrat was temperamentally and ideologi Read More
Recently, at a lunch with a group of graduate students, conversation turned to American colonial history, then to John Winthrop's 1630 speech “A Modell of Christian Charity,” associated now with an image borrowed from Jesus, “a city on a hill.” This phrase has been grossly misinterpreted, both Winthrop's use of it and Jesus'. In any case, the students pronounced the speech capitalist, with Read More
‘In truth,” writes John Barton at the beginning of “A History of the Bible,” “there are no versions of either Christianity or Judaism that correspond point for point to the contents of the Bible, which is often not what it has been made into and read as.” That is a gentle way of putting it. What he means, as he goes on to show over the next 200 pages, is that the Old and New Testaments Read More
In Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, Wilfred M. McClay has produced an inspiring exploration of America’s past that is out of step with the fashionably fractured narratives...
