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 [...]
It is noteworthy that readers of What Maisie Knew by Henry James don’t get a look at Maisie for most of the 1897 novel. All of the action is seen [...]
Near the end of his 2015 book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University, notes: One of the odd facts about the [...]
I read Humphrey Carpenter’s 1980 biography of Jesus with a great deal of admiration at his earnestness and chutzpah. In his preface, Carpenter notes that the modest book (95 [...]
The hardcover edition of Mike Dash’s 2002 Batavia’s Graveyard has no subtitle. But, to attract potential buyers, these words are at the top of the dustjacket: THE TRUE STORY OF [...]
If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning [...]
As someone who writes books, I felt a pang of empathy for Scott W. Berg when I heard that he’d published in September a new book about the Great Chicago [...]
The Demon Breed, published in 1968 by James H. Schmitz, has been described as the first or one of the first examples of feminist science fiction because it is centered [...]
Over the past eight years, since April, 2016, I’ve been working my blissful way through Terry Pratchett’s 41 Discworld novels, starting with the first one, The Color of Magic — [...]
At the start of the Great Flood: And a little black spot begun to spread, Like a bottle of ink spilling over the sky; And the thunder rolled like a [...]
