A collection of 291 posts
Jefferson emerges as a man who doubted democracy's permanence yet placed his faith in future generations. Onuf and Cogliano rescue him from caricature—even if one dimension of his thought remains in shadow.
The US vice president’s new memoir leaves an unflattering impression of its author.
British author Josh Ireland’s new book about the murder of Leon Trotsky tells the gripping story of a rivalry between two very different men.
The most consequential weakness of philosopher and journalist Kathleen Stock’s new polemic against assisted dying is its failure to engage with the empirical record.
A fabulous new history of the Cambridge Five by Antonia Senior provides the definitive account of Britain’s most famous traitors.
A new book about Stephen King’s early novels will only appeal to hardcore fans, but its very existence is a reminder of its subject’s incalculable cultural impact.
Susan Owens’s handsome new monograph reconsiders the life and career of the English landscape painter John Constable.
In a fascinating new book, historian Anthony Bale vividly reconstructs the brutal, fantastical, and sometimes deeply religious experiences of medieval travellers across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
What radar and jet propulsion were to World War Two, robotics and artificial intelligence will be to the next war between great powers.
A new book by Phoebe Maltz Bovy argues that most accounts of female heterosexuality minimise and even theorise away its central feature: women’s sexual desire for men.
The son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers has written a perceptive, fascinating, and rather sad book about his lonely life as the child of violent revolutionaries.
As an energy shock looms, a new book reframes recession as the product of historical circumstance, not cyclical inevitability.
In an excellent new biography of Rasputin, British military historian Antony Beevor argues that perception can be a more powerful shaper of world events than reality.
Earth Day once helped focus public attention on real environmental problems. Today it is a festival of alarmism, misanthropy, technophobia, and moral theatrics.
The new film 'Project Hail Mary' based on Andy Weir's bestselling novel, celebrates scientific problem-solving on a cosmic scale. There are striking parallels with David Deutsch's radical optimism.