Reviews and Essays
A Faculty for Espionage
October 25, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
The U.S. entered World War II with an intelligence deficit. Its allies and enemies had long-established clandestine operations, some of them dating back centuries. But the Americans had no dedicated spy service and relied
Echos of an Imperial Composer
August 23, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
Was Tchaikovsky a tempest or a drudge? The great Russian composer of iconic works like “The Nutcracker” and the “1812 Overture” is generally thought to have lived a life of melodrama. An alcoholic and an insomniac, he endured a catastrophic marriage and suffered
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
July 6, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
In an extraordinary gesture of trust, the American president left Washington, D.C., on September 9, 1943, and handed the British prime minister his keys. “Winston, please treat the White House as your home.
Sharp Bookmark
May 15, 2024 | The Millions
Is Salman Rushdie an artist or a symbol? Can he be one but not the other? Or perhaps it’s an all-or-nothing affair and he is both or else neither. Ever since Rushdie, the author of 13 novels, was violently attacked onstage
Paul Auster’s Voice
May 8, 2024 | The Millions
Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned from my wife to preserve momentum on very long books.
Great Lakes Odyssey
April 5, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
In a time of pessimism and uncertainty, storytellers have recently turned to the future to predict a grim world that yet retains flickers of light. HBO’s recent series “The Last of Us” explored the familiar terrain of the zombie apocalypse through the bond between
The Killing of an IRA Man
April 1, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
The political conflict in Northern Ireland that not so long ago involved a cycle of terror and reprisal has given way to a series of dry bureaucratic spats. The regional parliamentary assembly in Belfast recently reconvened
Emptying the Bookshelves
December 22, 2023 | The Wall Street Journal
“We’re going through Dad’s bookshelves and wondered if you’d like us to save some things for you?” This innocent question, posed by phone in the fortnight between my father’s death and his memorial service
Plains Writing
November 30, 2023 | The Economist
The American West is a great setting for a story, but a hard place to live. That is the theme of new biographies of Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry, 20th-century novelists who abandoned a life
Writing in Reverse
November 20, 2023 | The Millions
Hilary Mantel wrote with a novelist’s flair and a historian’s mind. Her fiction overflows with the busy detritus of life: this plate of fruit, that whispered threat, children at play, a plucked string. The accretion of detail
The World in Their Hands
November 17, 2023 | The Wall Street Journal
Of all the artifacts that persist in the face of new technology, the globe may be strangest. Books have stubbornly clung to market share despite the rise of e-readers. Mechanical wristwatches remain the subject
Anchored in Space, Voyaging in Time
September 22, 2023 | The Wall Street Journal
On his first night in rehabilitation after a massive stroke at age 68, the writer Jonathan Raban took on a project. “I had long promised myself to read Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945—a long book