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
· 10 min read
Review
A collection of 123 posts
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
· 14 min read
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
· 15 min read
What We’re Reading in May
Discover new reads hand-picked by our editors.
Quillette
· 6 min read
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
· 23 min read
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
· 12 min read
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
· 17 min read
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
· 8 min read
A Moronic Inferno
America First and the looming spectre of an illiberal international.
Jeffrey Herf
· 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
· 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
· 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
· 8 min read
A Historian for Our Moment
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.
Sol Stern
· 14 min read
A Dense Thicket of Contending Visions
In his latest novel, Tom Piazza imagines the finest meeting of American minds never to have happened.
Matt Hanson
· 6 min read
Mutual Friends: The Adventures of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
A charming exhibition at London’s Charles Dickens Museum provides a fascinating glimpse into the private lives of two great English writers.
Hannah Gal
· 7 min read