In July 2001, a few days after Slobodan Milosevic was flown to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Janine di Giovanni went to Sarajevo to see how it felt for those who had suffered so brutally from his rule. But she found no one celebrating. Some of the ‘big fish’ were getting caught, but
William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey is thought of as a supreme example of romantic hubris and defiance of nature. The tower, 276 feet high, originally intended to exceed the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, crumbled and fell within 20 years. Robert J. Gemmett, Professor of English in New York State University, gives a very readable account of
This book is an abridged version of one of the great works of modern classical scholarship, Donald Kagan’s four-volume history of the Peloponnesian war, which originally appeared between 1969 and 1987. This crisis in the affairs of the Greek world in the fifth century BC was seen, even at the time, as a turning point
Tim Guest spent his boyhood in the Rajneesh spiritual communes during their heyday in the 1980s when they caused countless eyebrows to rise, boomed spectacularly and bust luridly in Poona, Oregon, Suffolk, and scores of places in between. So naturally he was dressed in orange from head to toe and inside and out, wore a
Film posters are not made to last. They appear on billboards, then they are torn down or pasted over. Sometimes they do not have even that brief visibility. The original 1927 poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s state-sponsored retelling of the 1917 Russian Revolution was dominated by the face of Trotsky. However, just as Eisenstein was getting
In the spring of 1943, Allied armies in North Africa prepared to attack the Axis powers on the continent of Europe. Dominating the central Mediterranean, Sicily was the obvious first target, and it was clear the German High Command would heavily reinforce the island. To counter this, British naval intelligence concocted a bold disinformation operation
Robert Browning, in life, was always immensely popular in a worldly way; he knew everyone not just in London but in Europe, and was almost universally loved over the dinner table. More than that, his shining, decent, boldly original mind leaps out from any biography, and it is easy to see how enchanting and charming
