Conjurer of Worlds

The writer who made fantasy history

The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien's Creation by Michael D. C. Drout

Hold the Salt

Reconsidering an ancient city’s bad reputation

Carthage: A New History by Eve MacDonald

Scientists in Dreamland

What might our nightly visions mean?

Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer's Guide Through the Sleeping Mind by Michelle Carr

The Minotaur’s Muses

The romantic cruelty of a brilliant artist

Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso's Life by Sue Roe

Compassionate Curmudgeon

Why we must root ourselves in the real world

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods

Swept Away

A gusty tour of one of our planet’s primordial forces

The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind by Simon Winchester

Jessica Mitford on the British late-night talk show After Dark; August 20, 1988 (Wikimedia Commons)

Making Trouble

A British aristocrat’s leftist noblesse oblige

Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan

All His Biographers Merely Players

Retracing the Bard’s lost years

The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare by Daniel Swift

Playwright, Poet, Outsider, Spy

The Wayward Scholar of the London Stage

A Stranger Everywhere

The inner world of one of America’s great warrior poets

Baldwin: A Love Story Nicholas Boggs

Subjectivity Is All

Using a lifetime of colorful examples to define the undefinable

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond By Peter Gay

The Casserole Inquisition

Chronicles from America’s culinary transformation

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food By Judith Jones

Wry Eye on the Bard

Sorting through the little we know about the best we’ve got

Shakespeare: The World as Stage By Bill Bryson

Latin’s Eminent Career

Is the language of empire, the church, scholarship, and Europe nearing retirement?

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin By Nicholas Ostler

A Long Walk in the New World

Of 300 Spaniards sent to settle Florida, only four survived

A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca By Andrés Reséndez

The Genius and Her Sanctuary

Pivotal moments in the pairing of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice By Janet Malcolm

Atonality and Beyond

The century when composers and audiences parted company

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century By Alex Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Early End of Consensus

Bitter partisanship began soon after George Washington left the scene

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign By Edward J. Larson

Swept Away

When Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he immersed himself in his subject’s horrors

The Wreck of the Medusa By Jonathan Miles

Nurtural Intelligence

The discoverer of the Flynn effect claims that genes control IQ less than you’d expect

What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect By James R. Flynn

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