Woody Allen’s movies have trickled off in quality over the years — I’ve liked only four of his last 20. So it’s... Read More

During the Cuban missile crisis, the writer Christopher Isherwood was surprised to find himself going to the gym. “If we are to be... Read More

I am not usually one to see a glass as half full, especially when any idiot can see that it’s half empty, as it is right now. But the... Read More

George Herman Ruth was never one to share a spotlight. But then again, why should he have? Yet encroaching onto Ruth’s spotlight is... Read More

Volume One of Robert Frost’s Letters wound up in 1919 with his ­resignation from a teaching position at Amherst College, where... Read More

Jonathan Bate is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Shakespeare. He is a senior research fellow and professor of English... Read More

Spanish moss, rumbling streetcars, honking automobiles, street vendors, artists, prostitutes, nuns, tourists, speakeasies, restaurants, and... Read More

In early 2016, Harvard’s 24 house masters became “faculty deans.” A few months later, Yale made each master of its... Read More

In the modern era, few artists have gripped the public’s imagination with a legend of biography and cult of personality quite like... Read More

FOR JENNIFER PEARSON, the choice was difficult but clear: Shut down the library, or people could die. “My library was filled with... Read More

After leaving high school in tenth grade for Duke, studying at Oxford (where Tolkien’s tutoring bored him to death), and finishing a... Read More

In the 1980s, my father wrote a guide, Writers in Sussex, for which I took the photographs. During our research we visited the former... Read More

It used to be that nobody ever called me. I’d get lonely notices on my phone, reading, “Last week you had one minute and twelve... Read More

Good Things Out of Nazareth—a volume of Flannery O’Connor’s previously uncollected letters to friends—tells us an... Read More

Few lines from the poet W.H. Auden are more familiar than his declaration, in a moving (if at times oddly sentimental) elegy called “In... Read More

The plague that gave Albert Camus’s novel its title is the plague but it is also, as Stephen Spender put it in his 1948 New York Times... Read More

When the plague came to London in 1665, Londoners lost their wits. They consulted astrologers, quacks, the Bible. They searched their bodies... Read More

In June 1813, London’s Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure published two letters from Russia. They were written by Eleanor... Read More

Does Emily Dickinson ever go out of style? A new biography by Martha Ackmann came out just recently. The feature film Wild Nights With Emily,... Read More

Conscientious Christians (sometimes non-Christians too) are wont to ask in tricky situations: “What would Jesus do?” Fortunately... Read More

At least when their authors avoid offering a thesis, novels acquire peculiar value in deranged times. They allow us to see cracks in... Read More

Geoffrey Cain’s “Samsung Rising” reads like a dynastic thriller, rolling through three generations of family intrigue,... Read More