Some years ago, a colleague on the Irish Times took the columnist Nuala O’Faolain to lunch. Nuala was famous, and feared, as a controversialist who specialised in attacking popular pieties, unless it was the... Read more »
I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom is a new biography by Professor Julia Gaffield of William & Mary. The book sheds light on the life and legacy of... Read more »
Everything is in decline, argues the geographer Samuel Miller McDonald. Democracy and free speech are in freefall. Inequality is soaring, with the 1% scooping up ever-larger shares of global wealth. These days,... Read more »
“The best president in the history of our country,” declared then-president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2019. “I still govern according to his example.” Standing at the foot of a... Read more »
Shortly after her release from Ravensbrück in 1945, Comtesse Germaine de Renty attended a dinner party in Paris with old friends. One guest complimented her on how well she was looking, concluding... Read more »
The first thing you should know about Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is that it is a beautiful book and you should stop reading this right... Read more »
Can a historical novel be morally serious, even tragic, and also playful at the same time? For a writer of fiction, history is a dangerous thing to play with—one doesn’t want to... Read more »
One muggy afternoon in June 2010, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann, were relaxing over a bottle of champagne with their two sons, Tim and Alex, when they heard a loud knocking... Read more »
Can anything new be said about the second world war? Unexpectedly the answer is yes. Here are just a few of the surprising facts that I learned from this revelatory book. The... Read more »