The headline, standfirst and reviewer from each outlet. Each links to the full review and to the book’s page here.
Very occasionally a play has a significance beyond the confines of the theater. Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1778) sounded the death knell of the feudal droit du seigneur. Le Roi s’amuse (1832), Victor Hugo’s savage exposé of Louis Philippe’s corrupt monarchy, was banned after a single…
Toward the end of his biography of Roy Cohn, written with his wife, Susan Goldmark, Kai Bird quotes the editor and publisher Jason Epstein: “In a way, he’s not real, he has no substance.” On the other hand, a note to the list of characters for Tony Kushner’s landmark drama Angels in America (1991)…
A nuanced new history by Mark Mazower reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed antisemitic.
Joe Kloc’s portrait of a group of outsiders living on boats in Marin County provides a record of a community many wish would quietly disappear.
Patients with undiagnosed conditions suffer not only from their symptoms but also from the uncertainly of not knowing what afflicts them.
A new initiative at the Prado calls visitors’ attention to the many works in the collection acquired by royal women.
In The Diversity of Morals, Steven Lukes attempts to reconcile philosophical arguments that there is one morality despite cultural differences with empirical studies that suggest it’s all relative.
Timely questions lurk at the heart of connoisseurship: What counts as originality, what value do we place on it, how do we protect it?
In Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a heist and a femme fatale plunge an ecojournalist into an all-too-real climate collapse.
A biography of Peter Matthiessen captures his antithetical actions and character while never losing sight of his ardent attentiveness to the natural world.
In its skewering of London’s literary egos, Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House takes a step away from her previous parent-dominated novels, but it too is told by a middle-aged woman struggling to come to terms with her childhood and adolescence.
