George Frost Kennan was one of the most influential of all American diplomats, as well as an historian and writer who won two National Book Awards and two Pulitzer Prizes. It was Kennan who, first in his “long telegram” sent from the American embassy at Moscow in February 1946, and then in his anonymous “X” article in Foreign Affairs the following year, laid out for policy-makers, and then for the American public, the true nature of Stalinism and Soviet policy at a time when some still took a benevolent view of our wartime Soviet ally.

This article is filed under Biography, Books, History, Non-Fiction Reviews.

His opinions, though held intensely and vocally, are often unpredictable: he has long maintained The Exorcist to be the greatest film ever made, but has also in the past championed the work of Zac Efron and the Twilight franchise, and has recently taken to insisting that Jaws is actually a movie about adultery rather than, say, a large shark.

This article is filed under Books, Movies, Non-Fiction Reviews.

There may not be space in a blog post to let the reader weigh the words and come to their own conclusion, guided by your discreet commentary, but this habit of GLOSSING EVERYTHING IN ALL CAPS grates across two hundred and fifty pages. There’s little rhetorical virtue in having the last word in your own paragraph.

This article is filed under Books, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

For an artist who vied with Rembrandt in painting self-portraits, van Gogh seldom allowed himself to be photographed. The one surviving photo, from his days at Goupil’s, shows a scowling, tousled haired young man with troubled, searching eyes. It is the face of a man destined to be a prophet or a lunatic.

This article is filed under Art, Biography, Books, Non-Fiction Reviews.

Our book reviewers select the best books of 2011.

This article is filed under Best Books, Books, Non-Fiction Reviews.

Perhaps, the best way of approaching Conrad’s book is to regard it primarily as a meditation on creativity. As with opera itself, where passion and empathy lead, intellectual appreciation will follow. The key insight of this fine book is easy enough to grasp. In an age of strutting nationalism, both Verdi and Wagner gave the world music that ultimately transcends the limits of borders or political ideology, regardless of how subsequent regimes used it.

This article is filed under Biography, Books, Germany, Italy, Music, Non-Fiction Reviews, Opera.

The Vietnam War had been shredding bodies and hopes for so long that it hardly seemed possible that a single image of human conflict could pierce through the war’s futility and touch our hearts. And then photographer Nick Ut captured “The Girl in the Picture” on film. He aimed his Leica M-2 camera and with one quick “click,” Phan Thi Kim Phuc, became a symbol of the horror of the Vietnam War and by extension all wars.

This article is filed under Books, Design, Non-Fiction Reviews.

In his new history of the borough’s development you can virtually trace the emergence of America most talented writers, among them figures like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, Bernard Malamud, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller. They, among many other notables, were residents in that “outlandish place,” and, it would seem, most often by choice!

This article is filed under Books, History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Writers.

The happiness was not to last. More Scrooge than Bob Cratchit in some respects, he was not particularly fond of his sons. Charley, his eldest, he deemed to be suffering from a “lassitude of character” and he did not see much hope for the others. He worried they might metamorphose into his father or his brothers, relying on him for handouts. And he was becoming thoroughly sick of Catherine.

This article is filed under Biography, Books, Great Britain, Non-Fiction Reviews, Writers.

David Abulafia’s new book about the Mediterranean Sea, The Great Sea, has everything a major work of history requires. An important theme, solid research, magnificent writing and a perceptive insight into human nature figure prominently in the pages of his study of the body of water that the Romans called mare nostrum, “our sea.”

This article is filed under Books, History, Non-Fiction Reviews.