Beyond the Balkans – Eric Ambler and the British Espionage Novel, 1936-1940
November 27, 2025Eric Ambler (1909-1998) was one of the foremost architects of espionage fiction as it exists today....

Book Review: The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination
November 3, 2025It was at Oxford University that Burne-Jones found divine beauty and William Morris. They shared a...

Book Review: George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis
October 19, 2025George Frost Kennan was one of the most influential of all American diplomats, as well as...
Book Review: Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
October 11, 2025For an artist who vied with Rembrandt in painting self-portraits, van Gogh seldom allowed himself to...
Book Review: Verdi and/or Wagner: Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries by Peter Conrad
October 4, 2025Perhaps, the best way of approaching Conrad’s book is to regard it primarily as a meditation...
Book Review: Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
September 26, 2025The happiness was not to last. More Scrooge than Bob Cratchit in some respects, he was...
Book Review: Blue Nights by Joan Didion
September 23, 2025We learn that Quintana Roo was adopted, a beautiful precocious girl with hair “bleached by the...
Book Review: Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream and Five Acres in Maine by Lou Ureneck
September 22, 2025In September 2007, Lou Ureneck, a 56-year-old journalism professor at Boston University, was hospitalized for atrial...
Book Review: Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow
September 21, 2025So if she wasn’t pleasant, what was Pauline Kael? She was earthy; she was tough; she...
Book Review: Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris
September 12, 2025Woolf spent much of her life trying to free herself from the grasp of the past,...






