The tale begins in the spring of 1945 when a war-weary world began to prepare for peace and dream of freedom The delegates of 50 nations who gathered in San Francisco that April forged a charter for the United Nations that pledged each nation to promote the rights of all individuals No one had y

Ever since Seattle erupted into a free-trade fighting zone during the World Trade Organization’s 1999 meeting, the very scheduling of a global economic gathering has become a provocation to activists worldwide. What happened suddenly in Seattle has been transformed into rituals of resistance l

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

Consistory of Cardinals Meets with PopeIn the largest meeting of its kind ever held at the Vatican, more than 150 cardinals joined Pope John Paul II to discuss questions of collegiality, dialogue and evangelization in the church. The pope opened the consistory, which met from May 21 to 24, with a pr

More than 80 years ago, the British historian Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) made a name for himself by writing short biographies that debunked their subjects, but did so with elegance and wit. He combined the style of a minor Evelyn Waugh with the slant of a demolition expert like Robert Caro, whose s

For the first time in the nation’s various wars on drugs, the scientific, political and spiritual stars are aligned for a revolution to balance and strengthen all four legs of this country’s effort to tackle substance abuse and addiction: research, prevention, treatment and law enforceme

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

During the cold war, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists became famous for its Doomsday Clock. The position of the hands on the clock showed how close the world was, in the judgment of the publication’s board of directors, to the midnight of mass nuclear annihilation. Every time the directors mo

Has the time come to revive the idea of a national pastoral council for the Catholic Church in the United States a quarter-century after the scheme was effectively abandoned? Opinions will differ on that. But two events this year are reminders that establishing some such body really is part of the u