In the mid-1970s, exiled from the Soviet Union for exposing its vast crimes against humanity, and having won the Nobel Prize in Literature... Read More
Lea Ypi’s Free: Coming of age at the end of history (Allen Lane) is an enthralling account of the end of communism in Albania... Read More
“The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks,... Read More
Do you ever feel that a book should be an essay, an essay a paragraph, a paragraph a sentence? That’s not quite the case with Harry... Read More
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was the philosopher’s anti-philosopher. His professional credentials were impeccable: an influential... Read More
The idea that there was a definite beginning to the universe as we know it, at a time we can calculate, is well established in the public... Read More
To an unusual degree among the great philosophers, G W F Hegel’s influence has waxed and waned. At his death in 1831, he was... Read More
The end of the Cold War, and the period of reflection in its wake, settled the argument between liberty and tyranny decisively in favor of... Read More
In this sequel to his 2016 book Fascism: Career of a Concept, Paul Gottfried turns his attention to antifascist critics and movements... Read More
(Excerpted from "The Loft Generation: From the de Koonigs to Twombly'" by Edith Schloss (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021) When I first met... Read More
Andrew Wilson’s I Saw Him Die (Simon and Schuster, 2021, £8.99) is the fourth of Wilson’s detective novels... Read More
The competition to snag Amazon’s second headquarters and the estimated 50,000 jobs that go with it has 20 finalist cities desperately... Read More
Newcomers and established prize winners alike stunned us this year with exceptional novels. These 50 standouts are worth your consideration... Read More
“Never in the modern age,” Bernard-Henri Lévy writes in his new book, The Will to See, “has humanity been... Read More
‘We the People,” the first three words of the Constitution, were a bit of legerdemain on the part of draftsman Gouverneur Morris,... Read More
On "Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer" by Rax King (Vintage, 2021) I met Rax King outside of a bar on the first truly... Read More
The world probably changed more between Dec. 5 and Dec. 12, 1941, than in any other week in history. In early December German forces stood... Read More
“In the beginning, the mountains had great wings.” So begins Italian publisher and writer Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin... Read More
Foodies rejoice because this is your holiday! Yes, Thanksgiving is all about, literally, giving thanks. But it’s also,... Read More
Books and travel have always gone hand in hand, but the current pandemic, in which people from around the world experienced mass lockdowns,... Read More
Idate every book that I read. Why? My stock answer, cut from the mold of Walter Mitty, is, “In case someday, someone cares to go back... Read More
In the early 1950s the American, Henry Hope Reed (1915-2013), had the temerity to suggest that most contemporary architecture then was... Read More
At a party many years ago, I jokingly told another guest that I’d do my best to remember his name after I published a book to great... Read More
There were many, hundreds upon hundreds, of emails that catalogued 15 years of friendship and low-grade skullduggery with Gerald Joseph... Read More
The truth about Fyodor Dostoyevsky has proved to be as mysterious and inexhaustible as the enigmatic figures he wrote about, drawing the attention of novelists (Leonid Tsypkin, J. M. Coetzee) and any number of biographers (Joseph Frank, Leonid Grossman). In “Dostoevsky in Love,” published earlier this year, Alex Christofi combined genres, plucking lines from Dostoyevsky’s fiction and trainin... Read More
If there were a Pulitzer Prize for premature speculation, it might go to David M. Drucker for his new book, “In Trump’s Shadow.” He assumes there will be a contested Republican presidential primary campaign in 2024, even if Donald Trump chooses to run. He admits that “top Republicans . . . revolve in an uneasy orbit around Trump as if moons circling a careening asteroid.” And he tell... Read More
In this meticulous, relentless biography, Joseph P. Kennedy is now firmly established in the annals of twentieth-century fascism. When he arrived in England in early 1938, he quickly found a home among the ruling elite who believed, as Susan Ronald puts it, that “fascism was the cure for communism.” Notwithstanding FDR’s unprecedented provocation of sending an Irishman with no diplomatic ski... Read More
