Ed McBain’s 1954 novel Killer’s Wedge, the eighth book in his 87th Precinct series, opens with a short poetic rhapsody to autumn in the city: Outside the grilled windows of [...]

In the opening scene of Robert van Gulik’s 1967 Judge Dee mystery Necklace and Calabash, the judge is on his way to a quick fishing vacation in Rivertown but has [...]

I’m not sure if Anne Kraatz’s 2006 Solstiss: The Seduction of Lace was a book commissioned by the Solstiss company. In 1989, Kraatz wrote the delightfully erudite Lace: History and [...]

There are two major characters in Philip Gefter’s Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” One is the four-actor play Who’s [...]

A strikingly drawn and boldly colored map, attributed to the Jesuit priest and explorer Jean de Brebeuf, is the image used on the cover of Mirela Altic’s Encounters in the [...]

  In 1935, Nicholas Blake published A Question of Proof, his jocosely told murder mystery and the first of sixteen novels which featured the gentleman detective Nigel Strangeways.  Blake also [...]

George Hardin Brown, the noted Stanford University medievalist and expert on Bede the Venerable, died at the age of 90 in 2021.  He had spent his entire adult life studying [...]

  For more than eighteen centuries, paper was made with rags — such as old clothes, sails and ropes — the same way it had first been fashioned in China.  [...]

In The Bible and Poetry, published last year, Michael Edwards warned against the temptation to paraphrase the Bible. An English-born French poet and scholar, Edwards noted that much of the [...]

Florence at the end of the fifteenth century could be a dangerous place to have religious opinions. Girolamo Savonarola, an ascetic Dominican friar, won great praise and power by preaching [...]