Books

In novels such as Mary Reilly and Italian Fever Valerie Martin made her reputation balancing historical locations and characters with the social detail that we expect from comedies of manners She has excelled in tracing how undercurrents of emotion become visible flirting with the Gothic traditi

In our Amazon com Borders rsquo n rsquo Barnes amp Noble world we non-academics at least no longer pay much attention to libraries When was the last time you got worked up over anything connected with a library shortened hours confusing online catalogues Well for many Americans all that

Niall Ferguson is one of the leading mdash and almost certainly the most controversial mdash historian in contemporary Britain He last shocked his compatriots with The Pity of War which argued that Britain was as much to blame as Germany for World War I that the war could have been avoided and th

Historians and political scientists endlessly debate the sources of change in human societies What is more important in epochal transformation ideas or institutions personalities or power structures material or intellectual motives In the field of Russian studies the end of the cold war and i

Last Christmas a Canadian journal reported that a feminist scholar had attacked the prevalence of the image of Frosty the Snowman on seasonal cards and gift-wrap as an emblem of domineering patriarchy Frosty she grumped is a WEM White Euro-Male fat and overstuffed to boot Exceptional Not when

During World War II Arthur M Schlesinger Jr held a modest position in Elmer Davis rsquo s Office of War Information One of his few thrills was ghostwriting low-level messages for President Roosevelt Schlesinger recollects My first success was a presidential endorsement of Universal Bible Sunday

Who speaks for America Today for Tony Smith the answer clearly is American ethnic groups because they play a larger role in the shaping of the foreign policy of the United States than most recognize That impact he fears is largely negative and in his new book Foreign Attachments The Power o

People tend to look back and read history including their personal stories as inevitable Historians particularly those willing to ask What if can occasionally help us see the way that certain events might have been otherwise how much they depended on a gossamer tissue of contingencies not on

Aristotle was such a dope He misled generations of critics into thinking that art imitates nature Anyone who goes to the movies knows that art imitates other art Tom Hanks doesn rsquo t imitate anyone in the real world he imitates Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda Murders Indian wars and invasions

This is not the first book on the liturgy from Joseph Ratzinger a German Catholic theologian cardinal prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and former archbishop of Munich He has also written A New Song for the Lord as well as an important introduction to Klaus Gamber