Dec. 26, 2022 | For your ideas to succeed, said Friedrich Hayek, you have to outlive those who hate them. He died at the height of his fame... more »

Dec. 24, 2022 | What makes a book a book? Durability. Prophecies the book's demise have always given rise to new kind of books ... more »

Dec. 23, 2022 | Dickens and the rock star Prince shared a striking fashion sense, verbal lyricism, an addiction to audiences, and a lifelong engagement with Christianity. Does it matter?... more »

Dec. 22, 2022 | What are the best scholarly books of 2022? Anthony Grafton, Martha S. Jones, Matthew Desmond, and others make their picks... more »

Dec. 21, 2022 | Conceived as a vanity project, the library of Alexandria acquired a personality of its own ... more »

Dec. 20, 2022 | How a slight, young Norman Mailer — soft lips, large ears — became a barrel-chested macho in the Philippine jungles... more »

Dec. 19, 2022 | How Chekhov became Chekhov. In 1886 and 1887, the doctor battled a pandemic and found his literary form ... more »

Dec. 17, 2022 | The history of exhaustion. The fatigue of peasants was once taken for granted. But 21st-century tiredness is hyper-scrutinized... more »

Dec. 16, 2022 | For the Victorians, progress was “natural and built into the order of things.” The “technoscience” they promoted is with us still... more »

Dec. 15, 2022 | Did Jewish agents, editors, and writers mostly promote other Jews? Hardly. They were too busy tearing each other down ... more »

Dec. 14, 2022 | The ghost of Cecil Chesterton. G.K. couldn't escape the influence of his younger brother, by all accounts a stinker... more »

Dec. 13, 2022 | The life of Tony Tetro, master art forger, wasn't all cocaine and fast cars. But they're part of it... more »

Dec. 12, 2022 | The greatest generation of physicists. How arguments among a small group of scientists reconceptualized the world... more »

Dec. 10, 2022 | The perfect spy — and the perfect spy novelist — is someone, like John le Carré, who feels like an impostor in their own life... more »

Dec. 9, 2022 | It's all fun and games — until those games become the 21st century’s most advanced form of behavioral control... more »

Dec. 8, 2022 | Pilot, spy, romancer of starlets. Roald Dahl lived a cosmopolitan life before he started writing children’s fiction in the 1960s ... more »

Dec. 7, 2022 | Has science proven free will to be an illusion? Not quite. We are autonomous — up to a point... more »

Dec. 6, 2022 | It's been centuries since she hoisted her skirt to reveal fine red stockings. But we're still misreading the Wife of Bath... more »

Dec. 5, 2022 | "One would need a supercomputer...to keep track of all the couplings, love triangles and more ornate carnal geometries referenced" ... more »

Dec. 3, 2022 | Yes, T.S. Eliot’s prolonged and unconsummated relationship with Elizabeth Hale was crucial. But that doesn’t make her a “hidden muse”... more »

Dec. 2, 2022 | James Gillray, the “Prince of Caricatura,” spent long hours ridiculing the sexual and gastronomic excesses of the British royal family    ... more »

Dec. 1, 2022 | In the work of T.J. Clark, art history matches the philosophical ambition of artists like Cézanne, Pissarro, and Matisse ... more »

Nov. 30, 2022 | "Can We Survive Technology?" John von Neumann posed the question in 1955. We still await an answer... more »

Nov. 29, 2022 | “No matter how shit you think your life is, there are many millions in recent history who had it a lot, lot shitter”   ... more »

Nov. 28, 2022 | In his 30s, A.N. Wilson gossiped, slept around, and drank with other literary journalists “on a positively Slavic scale”... more »