Book Review: Rebellion
/Veteran popularizer Peter Ackroyd gives his readers a rattling good yarn of kings, decapitations, interregnums, frivolities, and depositions
Read MoreBook Review: The Marquis
/The boyish hero of the American Revolution who became a more problematic and complicated figure in the political upheavals of his native France, the celebrated Marquis de Lafayette gets a sparkling new biography
Read MoreBook Review: Imprudent King
/He ruled an empire on which, it was famously said, the sun never set - and he did all the paperwork himself! It's a new life of King Philip II of Spain
Read MoreThe Ides of March!
/Our book today is Thorton Wilder’s wonderful 1948 epistolary Roman historical novel The Ides of March; I found a neat old green-jacketed cover at the Brattle Bookshop the other day, and I smiled all the more readily at the sight of it, since I’d recently been unutterably wearied by the hosannas showered by the book-chat […]
Read MoreBook Review: Joan of Arc - A Life Transfigured
/The mighty Maid who led medieval France's armies to a string of improbable victories before being burned at the stake for witchcraft has been immortalized in song, on stage, on film - and in countless books. A new biography is the latest to tell the tale.
Read MoreCape Cod!
/Our book today is Henry David Thoreau’s beloved posthumous 1865 book Cape Cod, a collection of pieces he wrote for the Penny Press detailing trips he and a companion made to Cape Cod in 1849, 1850, and 1853. They tramped everywhere, in all weathers, and Thoreau’s razor-sharp observational powers caught every nuance of the local […]
Read MoreBook Review: Isabella, the Warrior Queen
/Biographer Kirstin Downey frees Queen Isabella from the shadow of her husband Ferdinand and sets her center-stage in her own incredible life
Read MoreBook Review: George Whitefield - America's Spiritual Founding Father
/In colonial America, a strange, otherworldly English preacher set off a tidal wave of fundamentalist revivalism that shaped an entire generation.
Read MoreBook Review: The Collapse
/Twenty-five years ago, the Berlin Wall came down and the structure of European politics changed literally overnight. A fantastic new book dissects a turning point in modern history
Read MoreBook Review: Desert God
/Wilbur Smith continues the adventures of his super-eunuch Taita in his latest novel set in ancient Egypt
Read MoreClassics Reissued: The Wars of Justinian
/Everybody knows Procopius as the author of the scandalous "Secret History" - but he wrote a long and fascinating work of straightforward history as well, and that work finally gets a great one-volume English edition.
Read MoreBook Review: The Woman Who Would Be King
/3000 years ago, a capable, enigmatic woman named Hatshepsut ruled Egypt for over twenty years; a spirited new biography tells her story
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Song of Roland!
/Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve noted, become curious little gems in their own right, regardless of the advance of scholarship or textual history, and one of those is the 1957 translation of La Chanson de Roland done by renowned mystery novel author Dorothy Sayers. The Song of Roland, that massively popular medieval verse epic about […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Georgetown Set
/In postwar Washington, a group of smart, well-placed and high-powered friends helped to set national policy over after-dinner conversation - a sparkling new book tells their story
Read MoreBook Review: New York Mid-Century, 1945-1965
/A new and raucous (and sometimes destructive) dawn of art, architecture, and nightlife broke over New York City in the decades after the Second World War; a gorgeous new book traces the major upheavals
Read MoreClassics Reissued: The Annotated Wuthering Heights
/New from the Belknap Press: a lavish new annotated edition of "Wuthering Heights"
Read MoreBook Review: Autumn, All the Cats Return
/Lieutenant Sebag returns in the second installment of Philippe Georget's top-notch murder-thriller series set in southern France
Read MoreBook Review: Political Order and Political Decay
/The author of "The End of History and the Last Man" completes his massive study of the life-cycles of human governmental systems
Read MoreBook Review: The Ugly Renaissance
/The age of Michelangelo and Leonardo was also the age of plague and pestilence; a new book finds this fact fascinating
Read MoreBook Review: 1381- The Year of the Peasants' Revolt
/A fascinating new book uncovers new depths and complexities in the much-studied events of Wat Tyler's Rebellion
Read More