Early in the first in-depth examination of bravura in art, Nicola Suthor, a professor of art history at Yale, tells the story of Raphael and Michelangelo meeting on the street. [...]
Fred Waitzkin’s 2019 novella Deep Water Blues has the feel of someone leisurely telling a simple modern-day sea saga about betrayal, violence and sharks amid a tropical paradise of cobalt [...]
Robert Stassi, a Methodist minister with two master’s degrees and a Ph. D., is explaining the exterminator business to the new recruit. Stassi is called The Most Dangerous Man because [...]
In 1971, Linda Nochlin wrote her groundbreaking ARTnews essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” as a manifesto of the new feminist art history, challenging millenniums of art-field [...]
It strikes me as odd that the last of Ralph Hale Mottram’s many books was The Twentieth Century: A Personal Record, published in 1969, two years before he died at the [...]
Elmore Leonard’s 1980 novel Gold Coast has one of the best brush-off, get-out-of-my-life, this-relationship-is-over lines I’ve ever seen: “I enjoyed meeting you. Now beat it. Okay?” I mention that as [...]
The 18-year-old blond boy runs, and Detective/2nd Grade Steve Carella gives chase through the large city park. He couldn't understand why the kid was risking more trouble than a small narcotics [...]
One parent who makes a short appearance in Louise Fitzhugh’s 1974 young adult novel Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change is a poverty-stricken ex-prize fighter named Mad Dog Madden. He’s [...]
Ken Follett’s 1978 novel Eye of the Needle works so well — nearly half a century later, it remains a gripping read — that it may well be the perfect [...]
Shroud for a Nightingale, published in 1971, was the fourth crime novel by P.D. James, the fourth of a series centered on Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh that would eventually [...]
