It was almost 40 years ago. I was in my mid-20s, prowling around the cramped and labyrinthine aisles of a bookstore on Clark Street in Chicago, a couple blocks south [...]

I’ve known David Axelrod for more than 30 years. We were colleagues as reporters at the Chicago Tribune. Then, after he moved across the street to become a political operative [...]

There is much to admire in Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2013), but I had my problems with [...]

Robin Gibson’s book The Portrait Now was published in connection with an exhibition of the same name, organized by Gibson, on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London from [...]

“Rockets and Blue Lights (Close At Hand) to Warn Steam Boats of Shoal Water”r In Turner, his short biography of Joseph Mallard William Turner, Peter Ackroyd tells of [...]

Psychiatrist Irv Yalom is 83. I call him Irv because that’s what he asks his psychiatric patients to call him. I picture him as a sprightly firecracker of a guy, [...]

Sometimes, a piece of clothing or an aspect of fashion has a very specific meaning. In her 1981 book The Language of Clothes, Alison Lurie notes that British officials, following [...]

For the North, the goal of the Civil War was to reunite the nation. That’s how Abraham Lincoln defined it and why the northern states rallied behind the effort. Yet, [...]

Many of the books of the Bible are like Hollywood musicals. In Fiddler on the Roof, for instance, the narrative unfolds as characters interact, and, every once in a while, [...]