Review - Quillette

The Man Who Wasn’t There

Richard Morton Jack’s comprehensive new biography of Nick Drake offers a glimpse of a brilliant but troubled soul.

Matt Hanson

19 Jul 2024 · 10 min read

A photo of Glenn Loury reading a book in the 1980s. He is a black man with glasses, suit and tie

Sin and Social Science

Glenn Loury’s startlingly frank confessional memoir offers a complex portrait of a brilliant scholar and a profoundly flawed man.

John Lloyd

24 Jun 2024 · 14 min read

Salman Rushdie on stage, holding a copy of his book, Knife.

Unbowed but Gravely Wounded

Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, ‘Knife,’ describes the assassination attempt its author survived and offers a moving contemplation of mortality.

Paul Berman

3 Jun 2024 · 15 min read

What We’re Reading in May

Discover new reads hand-picked by our editors.

Quillette

18 May 2024 · 6 min read

A black and white portrait of Henry Wallace with a background of colourful Soviet-era stamps.

Misadventures of a Stalinist Stooge

Benn Steil’s engrossing new biography of Henry A. Wallace is a timely cautionary tale and a masterpiece of 20th-century American history.

Ronald Radosh

25 Apr 2024 · 23 min read

Frantz Fanon and university Palestine supporters

The Prophet of October 7?

Frantz Fanon’s defenders try to distance him from the of ethos of violence he advocated, even as they embrace his anti-colonialist rhetoric to promote anti-Zionism.

Leon Hadar

6 Apr 2024 · 12 min read

Werner Herzog in 2011. Wikimedia Commons.

Mystic Without a Church

Werner Herzog’s new memoir provides a look back on the magisterial and occasionally maddening career of a cinematic visionary.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

28 Mar 2024 · 17 min read

Keir Starmer and the red rose symbol of the UK Labour Party.

What Is the Labour Party For?

Sir Keir Starmer looks likely to become Britain’s next prime minister at a time when the democratic centre-left everywhere is facing a crisis of definition.

John Lloyd

26 Mar 2024 · 8 min read

A Moronic Inferno

America First and the looming spectre of an illiberal international.

Jeffrey Herf

19 Feb 2024 · 15 min read

Getting Better All the Time

Hannah Ritchie’s new book offers reasons to be cheerful about the present and the future.

Sean Welsh

15 Feb 2024 · 12 min read

Bestseller Reparations

In ‘American Fiction,’ director Cord Jefferson brings a devil-may-care effrontery to bear on the culture of self-censorship, progressive pieties, and artistic hypocrisy.

Thomas Larson

24 Jan 2024 · 7 min read

Master of Reality

“Things were bleak, they really were. Yet nobody was singing about that side of life, which is why we thought we should.”

George Case

22 Jan 2024 · 8 min read

Jeffrey Herf has made a scholarly commitment to document the words of Islamic Jew-hatred from their origins in Egypt and wartime Berlin. That has made him a lonely voice in the American professoriate.