Think twice before learning too much about your literary heroes. That is the lesson of Lance Richardson’s engrossing life of Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014), the globetrotting, Zen-minded author...
A famous photograph captures Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin during the 1945 Yalta Conference. They look cold in their greatcoats, and Stalin alone wears military dress. A handful of luxurious carpets...
Imagine you go to your local library to borrow a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. The classic novel has never been more topical, as sheriffs in Texas arrest midwives and...
Does biography illuminate the work of an artist? James Joyce slyly poked at this age-old question in his 1922 novel Ulysses. In one of the book’s many meandering scenes, Stephen...
Before he became a spy or a novelist, Ian Fleming was a newspaperman. In 1933 he reported for Reuters on a blockbuster show trial in the Soviet Union in which...
Picture a humble study. It is situated on a house’s second floor, near the bedrooms, forming an inner sanctum removed from the bustle of the street. A lamp sits on...
Josh Brolin is a postmodern cowboy. Masculine but too vulnerable to be macho, at ease on a motorcycle or on horseback, he looks best with dust in the grooves of...
Modern mountaineering is a quest for niche glory. The Earth’s highest peaks have been climbed and reclimbed so many times now that elite alpinists must distinguish themselves with obscure prizes:...
The United States entered World War II with an intelligence deficit. Its allies and enemies had long-established clandestine operations, some of them dating back centuries. But the Americans had no...
Was Tchaikovsky a tempest or a drudge? The great Russian composer of iconic works like “The Nutcracker” and the “1812 Overture” is generally thought to have lived a life of...
In an extraordinary gesture of trust, the American president left Washington, D.C., on September 9, 1943, and handed the British prime minister his keys. “Winston, please treat the White House...
Is Salman Rushdie an artist or a symbol? Can he be one but not the other? Or perhaps it’s an all-or-nothing affair and he is both or else neither. Ever...
Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned...
In a time of pessimism and uncertainty, storytellers have recently turned to the future to predict a grim world that yet retains flickers of light. HBO’s recent series “The Last...
The political conflict in Northern Ireland that not so long ago involved a cycle of terror and reprisal has given way to a series of dry bureaucratic spats. The regional...
“We’re going through Dad’s bookshelves and wondered if you’d like us to save some things for you?” This innocent question, posed by phone in the fortnight between my father’s death...
The American West is a great setting for a story, but a hard place to live. That is the theme of new biographies of Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry, 20th-century...
Hilary Mantel wrote with a novelist’s flair and a historian’s mind. Her fiction overflows with the busy detritus of life: this plate of fruit, that whispered threat, children at play,...
Of all the artifacts that persist in the face of new technology, the globe may be strangest. Books have stubbornly clung to market share despite the rise of e-readers. Mechanical...
On his first night in rehabilitation after a massive stroke at age 68, the writer Jonathan Raban took on a project. “I had long promised myself to read Tony Judt’s...
George Orwell was a man in need of a better half. Reserved and awkward, he was inept at manual tasks and perennially sick. For most of his brief life he...
I once invited Martin Amis to play tennis. The year was 2007 and he was visiting Chicago to promote his latest novel, House of Meetings. After his book talk, I...
People who love watches tend to be romantics, more interested in yesterday than tomorrow. The current Apple Watch can make calls and receive e-mails, track heartbeats and count sheep...
The pandemic is officially over. By federal declaration, the public health emergency expired on May 11, capping a general sense that has been in the air for months. Yet Covid-19’s...
A largely forgotten chapter of a little-remembered war between England and Spain provides the setting for this gripping study of human nature in extremis. Wager, a British frigate, crashed onto...
One of the best adventure books ever written begins with a failure. “The order to abandon ship was given at 5 p.m.” So opens Alfred Lansing’s “Endurance” (1959), the definitive...
A century ago, as the excitement of the Wright Brothers faded and the smoke from World War I cleared, a question arose: What was the future of the airplane? Few...
Three natural gifts defined Paul Newman’s career as a movie star. Act one: the eyes. Act two: the laugh. Act three: the voice. Newman's eyes brought the young actor his...