Taking the rough with the smooth
In The Ambassadors, Henry James sends Lewis Lambert Strether from Boston to Paris to retrieve Chad Newsome, the wayward heir…
Vice guys
In 1981, an FBI team visited Donald Trump to discuss his plans for a casino in Atlantic City. Trump admitted…
America’s other civil war
‘What makes the Red Man red?’ the Lost Boys asked in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). According to Sammy Cahn’s lyric,…
A hellish paradise
‘Short of writing a thesis in many volumes,’ Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in his preface to The Traveller’s Tree, ‘only…
Knight’s tale
In The Cousins’ War (1999), the Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips argued that three ‘civil wars’ had defined politics in…
Towards the best of all possible worlds
The flour is what matters, and not the mill, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote in his notebook in 1799. ‘When we…
Godly swingers
There were two communist manifestos of 1848. One had no influence whatsoever on the revolutions of that year, but now…
