In January 2000 the Smithsonian American Art Museum until recently known as the Smithsonian Museum of American Art closed until 2004 for major renovations to its home in the historic Old Patent Office Building in Washington D C Instead of storing all of its collection in vaults inaccessible to

Eamon Duffy president of Magdalene College Cambridge and Reader in Church History at the university is widely known for his award-winning book The Stripping of the Altars 1992 in which he portrayed the pre-Reformation Catholic piety of the English laity and their resistance to the deliberate

By any estimate the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz must be reckoned among the most important writers of the 20th century Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 professor of Slavic languages at the University of California at Berkeley for four decades freedom fighter for Poland in World War

David Kertzer author of the acclaimed study of the kidnapping of the Jewish child Edgardo Mortara by Pope Pius IX here expands his purview to take in the anti-Semitic behavior of all the popes from the restoration of the Papal States in 1814 to the accession of Pius XII in 1939 His study he says

Reviewing Francisco Jim nez rsquo autobiographical treatment of his early years through high school was a movingeven spiritualexperience for me I say spiritual because the situations he relates reminded me of people and events in my own life that have shaped me at the deepest levels of my being

John Simon known for the pungency of his drama and film critiques in New York magazine and elsewhere here delivers himself on writers touched by the spirit of poetrydreamers of dreams in the words of the prophet Joel The principal essays in this collection have appeared from 1991 onwards in Th