Archive

Stalingrad by vasily grossman translated by robert chandler and elizabeth chandler nyrb classics, 1088 pages, $27.95 Until surprisingly recently, most left-wing and liberal people were hesitant and equivocal about...

One of my worst and most embarrassing failures as a journalist was my attempt to interview Harold Macmillan, the former British prime minister. It happened on a train near...

We were warned about statues. The Psalms were so concerned about them that they said almost exactly the same thing in both the 115th and 135th of those often...

Most of my memory of my teenage years is firmly locked and sealed. Sometimes a long-forgotten smell, the most evocative of all the senses in this deodorized world, will...

Metternich:Strategist and Visionaryby wolfram siemanntranslated by daniel steuerharvard, 928 pages, $39.95 rn In the midst of a Haydn concert in London in June 1794, the young Clemens von Metternich...

Am I going to have to fall out of love with juries? For decades I have defended these curious committees, which can ruin a man’s life in an afternoon....

Good heavens, this is hard to write. To experience a national humiliation and shame is one thing. To describe it is far, far worse. It is like making a...

I achieved herd immunity many years ago. In fact, I think I was born with it. No, I am not talking about the supposed protection from disease granted by...

The story goes that the great sculptor Eric Gill (1882–1940) was inclined—for reasons we will come to—to over-emphasize sexual organs in some of his work. When he was commissioned...

Even when I was excited about the European Union, I was bored by it. It came into my life as an issue after the Cold War ended. Until then,...

I do not much like the British royal family. The Queen, though by far the best of them, takes increasingly frequent plunges into political correctness. This is presumably because...

Here is one way to try to understand Britain’s very odd general election, in which a nominally conservative politician has achieved an astonishing, puzzling thing. Alexander “Boris” Johnson attended...

I am currently being accused of serving as an apologist for Bashar al-Assad, one of the most gruesome tyrants in the world. I am also being attacked on social...

If your soul was visible as an animal, what would it be? I suspect mine would be a donkey—obstinate, pessimistic, and inconveniently noisy. Fortunately for me and everyone else...

In revolutionary countries you expect to find desecration: churches turned into lavatories or reformatories, their sanctuaries wrecked and defiled, their bells pulled down and melted, and their crosses tumbled...