Enraged to discover that Germany did not possess any work by Michelangelo, his favorite artist, Hitler was mildly consoled to find a painting by Caravaggio—Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio—whom Hitler thought was the same person as...
The writer was drinking himself to death. In his first flush of freedom—he had come to Iowa from a land ruled by a military dictatorship—he drowned himself in vodka, and when for the third day running he was rushed to the emergency room...
Contemporary metrical verse surprises many learned readers simply by existing. For all the reasons that Paul Fussell summarizes and for a great number more, much of the liveliest recent scholarship concludes that literary and cultural...
Everyone around the world with access to a television set saw the cataclysmic destruction of the World Trade Center towers, saw it in constant replay, burning—and burning itself into our collective retina. I saw it that way too, but first...
In a letter of December 1910, the young T. E. Lawrence defined civilization as “the power of appreciating the character and achievements of peoples in a different stage than ourselves.” No Englishman had a greater understanding of the past...
Last year, two days after Christmas and around three that afternoon, I passed out in the foyer of my home in Montclair, New Jersey. I hadn’t even had a drink, and I considered that fact, lying there on the hardwood floor, staring up, coming...
Two pairs of shoes still in their boxes: a pair of clean new Hongmahwang loafers and a pair of gilded, tacky Italian slippers. The footwear of a madman caught last December hiding in a rat-filled hole almost within sight of one of his many...
