Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
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 MoreBiographer Kirstin Downey frees Queen Isabella from the shadow of her husband Ferdinand and sets her center-stage in her own incredible life
Read MoreIn colonial America, a strange, otherworldly English preacher set off a tidal wave of fundamentalist revivalism that shaped an entire generation.
Read MoreTwenty-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 MoreWilbur Smith continues the adventures of his super-eunuch Taita in his latest novel set in ancient Egypt
Read MoreEverybody 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 More3000 years ago, a capable, enigmatic woman named Hatshepsut ruled Egypt for over twenty years; a spirited new biography tells her story
Read MoreIn 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 MoreA 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 MoreNew from the Belknap Press: a lavish new annotated edition of "Wuthering Heights"
Read MoreLieutenant Sebag returns in the second installment of Philippe Georget's top-notch murder-thriller series set in southern France
Read MoreThe author of "The End of History and the Last Man" completes his massive study of the life-cycles of human governmental systems
Read MoreThe age of Michelangelo and Leonardo was also the age of plague and pestilence; a new book finds this fact fascinating
Read MoreA fascinating new book uncovers new depths and complexities in the much-studied events of Wat Tyler's Rebellion
Read MoreThe protracted dynastic struggle of York and Lancaster is the dramatic subject of the new book by historian Dan Jones
Read MoreAn attractive new book collects the vibrant dinosaur artwork of Julius Csotonyi
Read MoreA lean and very readable history of the swindling, extrapolating, gambling, and cheating in Victorian England that gave rise to the financial world we have today.
Read MoreIt's been 75 years since Batman first darkened the nightmares of comic-book villains in Gotham City and around the world; a deluxe new anthology presents three of the Caped Crusader's most popular graphic novels
Read MoreJohn Quincy Adams dreamed of an America very different from the chaotic and largely agrarian new nation he served for the whole of his life, and the details of that dream are laid out in a fine new study
Read MoreAn exemplary new history tells the story of the First World War from the viewpoints of the aggressors
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.