What a bad time it has been for the nation’s best-known historians—that is, for the small number of historical writers, some affiliated with academic institutions and some not, whose books regularly inhabit the bestseller lists, whose faces...
What I do want to talk about is the packaging and marketing of the Civil War as part of a larger commodification of cultural desire in which the making of Turner’s film and his participation in it become exemplary. I wish to speak, that is...
In the heart of downtown Aberdeen, the tea room is the Tastie Tattie Shop. Today’s menu features tatties and chili, and the girl I give my order to is wearing a stud in her nose. Aberdeen, the Granite City, looks built to last, but the...
Joan Givner’s biography of Katherine Anne Porter possesses this “passion for life”; it is a full and moving dramatization of an inner portrait of Porter as she fought to establish an artistic integrity for herself against the most unlikely...
In First Monday in October, the movie that anticipated appointment of the first woman to the United States Supreme Court, Walter Matthau plays a role that amiably caricatures the late William O. Douglas. The plot is built around a...
In this biography, N. John Hall concentrates on the “facts” of Anthony Trollope’s career by presenting the effects of the novelist’s great creative energy and by recording the results of his multiple vocations and avocations. The Trollope...
However good, most newspaper articles are destined for the same fate as yesterday’s lead story—they wrap fish or line garbage cans. Sometimes, however, fate spares them such ignominy and places them between hard covers. This was the case...
The great chronicler of the diplomatic method, Harold Nicolson, once wrote that the origins of modern diplomacy can be traced to the “determinant” influence of Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu’s achievement was the development of a coterie of...
