Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
History's most famous divorce shook the world and changed history, but it took much more than a king snapping his fingers to make it happen - obscure men on fast horses risked their livelihoods and their lives to line up the paperwork.
Read MoreHH Richardson waxing, Louis Sullivan watching: America's first school of architecture at MIT. To science and technology add art and religion, and immigrants sculpting the sister of the Statue of Liberty.
Read MoreTwo scalpel-sharp political thrillers that mark the welcome return of the thoroughly winning, charismatic protagonists: Charlie Muffin and Joe DeMarco.
Read MoreThe author of Coming to My Senses in conversation with our own example of a very special breed of aesthete, the perfume lover.
Read MoreBoston's iconic Copley Square - with its Trinity Church and its Public Library - is a present-day tourist hotspot, but those visitors hardly suspect the deep and rich history of the area. American Aristocracy continues.
Read MoreQueen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was a cherished and beloved fixture of the British royal family for almost a century (and would certainly have stolen the show at her daughter's Diamond Jubilee, had she lived to see it) - but a new book claims the Queen Mum was just an ordinary human being - and not always a very nice one
Read MoreShe oversaw an shepherded the House of Windsor for a century and did more to shape its present character than anyone. Three years ago William Shawcross wrote an official and none-too-gossipy biography.
Read MoreShe's occupied the throne of Great Britain and the Commonwealth for 60 years, and in June Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Diamond Jubilee. Three new biographies try to understand the woman wearing the crown.
Read MoreIntertwining through Boston history: the rich, implacable music of Beethoven and the flinty austerity of the Boston Granite style of architecture - trace the connections, as American Aristocracy continues.
Read MoreHe survived years of dangerous exile, won his crown on the battlefield, and founded one of the most famous dynasties in human history - and yet we still haven't embraced Henry VII. A spirited biography seeks to change that.
Read MoreThe clash between Brahmin liberalism and the legacy of slave-trading focuses on a monument to the men who redeemed a city and ransomed a nation. "American Aristocracy" continues.
Read MoreYou choose a perfume, you apply it, and you let it live and breathe on your skin - but you never, never mix and match. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Our resident maitresse de parfums begs to differ - and shares some interesting discoveries
Read MoreTo the quintessential virtues the Puritans lent to a fledgling republic - globality, philantropy, and autonomy - the 'speaking aristocracy' of the Boston Brahmins added one more: the love of learning
Read MoreIn Nick Harkaway’s altogether remarkable novel Angelmaker, blistering gangster noir meets Rabelaisian comedy
Read MoreImpressionistic, idiosyncratic, unsubstantiated: Virginia Woolf's literary essays challenge us to rethink, not just our experience of reading, but our expectations of criticism itself.
Read MoreElizabeth Hardwick joined the literary world of mid-20th century Manhattan with every intention of making her mark upon it - which she did, in review after inimitable review, taking American book-discourse to levels and places it had never reached before
Read MoreWhere would Lionel Trilling, godfather of the liberal imagination, fit into our contemporary culture of ideas? And how much of that culture is of his making?
Read MoreMost criticism is reactive, but in his essay "The Poet," Ralph Waldo Emerson proved prophetic. He set a challenge and Walt Whitman took him up on it.
Read Morea poem
Read MoreRichard Poirier was one of the great bridge-builders--his sorely neglected classic A World Elsewhere drew upon the writing of Emerson but presciently anticipated the postmodernist ideas that would soon enter the mainstream.
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