On the opening page of his text for The Madonna, Jean Guitton, a French philosopher and theologian, notes that, in the Gospels, Mary doesn’t say much. That got me thinking, [...]

Twenty-three-year-old Will Andrews looks around him and sees the rich, vibrant, beautiful abundance of the natural world.  This happens at many, many points in John Williams’s 1960 novel Butcher’s Crossing. [...]

It’s pretty clear, early on, that Garry Ashe, young and silkily clever, is a murderer although maybe not the person responsible for the killing at the center of the 1997 [...]

For nearly half a century, Robert Alter has been reading and analyzing the books of the Hebrew Bible as works of literature and has become a towering presence in the [...]

Abraham Lincoln’s friend and courtroom colleague Henry Clay Whitney remembered him as a man with an agile and restless mind, as “a versatile genius, whether as a man or boy. [...]

Peter Ackroyd’s The English Soul: Faith of a Nation, published by the University of Chicago Press, is a rich and odd book — rich because of the author’s storytelling skill [...]

When Edwin, the overking of Northumbre, hears that Hild, his niece and sometime advisor, is pregnant, he is not pleased.  He tells her several times that the baby she is [...]

The central murder in Agatha Christie’s 1936 Cards on the Table is an audacious act that takes place in a closed-door room where a table of bridge players are intent [...]