The therapeutic value of the mystery novel
Every reader has a particular type of book reserved for therapeutic use, and in my case that type is the mystery. Whenever I am sick, depressed or overtired, I roll out the murder mysteries and spy...
View ArticleHow insurgents won the American Revolution
The historian T. H. Breen has written "American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People" to fill what he perceives as an imbalance in current representations of the American...
View ArticleA heart-wrenching portrait of pathological shyness
Alan Bennett (born 1934) is something of a rarity among showbiz stars of his generation: He has not written a memoir. To be sure, his work has often contained autobiographical elements. "The Lady in...
View Article“An Object of Beauty”: Steve Martin’s art-world dud
I was inspired to pick up Steve Martin's new novel, "An Object of Beauty", by a ridiculous kerfuffle that took place at New York's 92nd Street Y at the end of November. As just about everyone seems to...
View Article“The Memory of Love”: Excavating Sierra Leone’s postwar trauma
If anyone requires proof of how profoundly this world has changed in the last 60 or 70 years, the city of Freetown in Sierra Leone might serve as a prime exhibit. Novelist Graham Greene was posted...
View Article“Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin”: The inner life of Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin, who died in 1989 before the Internet swept away all other forms of written communication, was probably one of the last great letter-writers. And being, also, one of the most peripatetic...
View Article“No Regrets”: Discovering Edith Piaf’s epically messy love life
Edith Piaf, dead now for nearly 50 years, has become one of France's great national monuments, as lucratively exportable a product as Maurice Chevalier, Claude Monet and Crépes Suzettes. Everyone here...
View Article“Dorian Gray” as Wilde actually wrote it
More than a century after its publication, Oscar Wilde's novella "The Picture of Dorian Gray" is recognized as one of the classics of English literature, a masterpiece of fin-de-siècle aestheticism and...
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