Book Review: Lincoln's Autocrat
/President Lincoln's mercurial Secretary of War Edwin Stanton gets a full-dress biography that would have gladdened the heart of anybody who ever wanted to hit him with a shovel
Read MoreBook Review: James Merrill - Life and Art
/The poet James Merrill at long last gets the lavish soup-to-nuts biography he's always deserved
Read MoreBook Review: KL
/The sprawling system of concentration camps established by the Nazis gets its first comprehensive history
Read MoreBook Review: The Ransom of the Soul
/In his new book, Peter Brown offers a provocative and fascinating new look at the evolution of the Christian idea that you can be helped in the next life by how much moolah you fork over in this one
Read MoreBook Review: Visions and Revisions
/From the novelist, critic, and columnist Dale Peck comes a series of autobiographical essays and reflections about life during the height of the AIDS epidemic
Read MoreBook Review: Madness in Civilization
/A fantastic, important new study traces the history of insanity in human history
Read MoreBook Review: France 1940
/The military collapse of France in 1940 has been a punch line and byword for decades, but a provocative new book argues that the traditional view is too simple
Read MoreProtean Things
/Hilary Mantel's best-selling Tudor novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have made their way to the stage on the expert handling of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Zach Rabiroff had front row center.
Read MoreBook Review: One of Us
/In 2011, a man detonated a bomb in Oslo and then shot dozens of people on a nearby island before surrendering to police. A vivid new book tells the whole story of the victims - and the killer
Read MoreBook Review: Bonaparte, 1769-1802
/A gigantic new biography chronicles the rise-to-power of Napoleon Bonaparte
Read MoreBook Review: Hitler's Shadow Empire
/In 1936 Nazi Germany poured money and manpower into backing General Franco in the Spanish Civil War; a new history powerfully re-interprets that fraught relationship
Read MoreBook Review: Ministers at War
/A new book tells the story of the War Cabinet Winston Churchill assembled to fight the Second World War
Read MoreBook Review: Secret Warriors
/Beyond the battles and trenches of the First World War, a dozen less glamorous but no less vital fights were being waged - in laboratories and darkrooms and publishing offices. A vibrant new book tells the story of the other World War I
Read MoreBook Review: The Last Word
/The incestuously-close relationship between a literary biographer and his subject lies at the heart of Hanif Kureishi's new novel
Read MoreBook Review: King John and the Road to Magna Carta
/800 years ago, King John "Lackland" sealed Magna Carta and unwittingly laid the foundation for some of Western law; a new book takes a fresh look at this much-maligned figure
Read MoreBook Review: The Baltic
/For more than a thousand years, the sprawling area of the Baltic has played host to history, art, and fitful commerce - a new history tells the story.
Read More“Il n’y a pas d’Israël pour moi”
/In Michel Houellebecq’s uncannily timely new novel, the triumph of an Islamist government relieves the dreary banality that defines the secular France of the 21st century.
Read MoreThinking in Quotations
/On its schematic blueprints, the latest book by noted literary polymath Alberto Manguel is "about" Dante's Divine Comedy - but as Robert Minto discovers, this author is at his best when he's digressing.
Read MoreMary Anne and the Adventurer
/Traditional cynicism has always maintained that Benjamin Disraeli married Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis primarily for her money, but a new book argues that the real picture was a good deal more complex - and interesting - than that.
Read MoreUnconditional
/An Orwellian dystopia, a deposed humanity, and a cat passionately in love with a dog - Justin Hickey reviews Robert Repino's fiendishly clever novel Mort(e).
Read More
