William Shawn
Mind the gaps: a far-from comprehensive life of Hannah Arendt
A much-acclaimed German ‘biography’ of the Jewish exile from Königsberg who became one of the most influential political and social thinkers of the postwar decades spurns chronology in favour of thematic commentary
John Updike’s letters overflow with lust, ambition, guilt and shame
‘Affairs are cruel, and if they are sin, they carry the punishment with them’, he wrote to one of the many women he cheated on throughout a long life
