Literature Created Behind the Scene

My first encounter with a literary agent was in 1970, the year I worked in publishing for Quadrangle-New York Times Books. The agent was a man named Georges Borchardt. I was seeking the rights to publish a collection of the highbrow film criticism of his client Vernon Young. An Englishman, Young will always be memorable for me for informing Americans who too quickly called him by his first name that "My good friends call me Mr. Young. Won't you do likewise."

The post Literature Created Behind the Scene appeared first on .

Royal Heirs and Royal Airs

There's a mini-vogue in publishing now not so much for group biographies (how very 2019!) but for histories that take two apparently contrasted dynasties or individuals and then tease out their parallels, as well as their differences. Following on from Carol Gardner's The Divided North, which looked at the contrasting fortunes of black and white families in Portland, Maine, in the 19th century and Jonathan W. Jordan's Ike and Winston, which examined the lives of Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill during World War II and subsequently, Caroline Hallemann's The Kennedys and the Windsors takes on the ambitious task of following the American royal family, of sorts, and the British royal establishment, and finding links and connections between the two.

The post Royal Heirs and Royal Airs appeared first on .

Life After Death

There's a word for what it's like to become a mother, matrescence, which describes the way a woman's brain and body reorient themselves around providing comfort, sustenance, and safety for a newborn child. There is no word for what happens to a mother when that child is gone.

The post Life After Death appeared first on .

Rage Against the Democratic Machine

The timing of veteran Democratic consultant Tad Devine's screed of a book—How the Democrats Screwed Bernie—railing against his own party's establishment for blocking Sen. Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential bid perfectly reflects the mindless populism and rage against the mainstream that's consuming the Democratic Party at record speed.

The post Rage Against the Democratic Machine appeared first on .

Auden After Dark

In the middle of the 1930s, a young English schoolmaster, Wystan Hugh Auden, began writing a torrent of tremendous poems. Some are rollicking ballads, others tender love sonnets, others philosophic observations about the ominous movement of world history. But they tended to be rhymed and metered and they did something most people had thought impossible. They took the "unpoetic" things about the 20th century—from fascism to airplanes to oncology—and bundled them into something about which lovers of the basically bucolic English tradition that runs from Shakespeare to Keats and Tennyson could say, "That's poetry!"

The post Auden After Dark appeared first on .

War Stories in Gritty Detail

Maps and arrows. Too often they are the principal gist of military histories—recounting the movement of armies, ships, or aircraft. Such accounts frequently delve into technical descriptions of weaponry brought to bear. While some punctuate with anecdotes from individuals involved, those recollections are commonly offered by generals and admirals, colonels and captains.

The post War Stories in Gritty Detail appeared first on .

Caution: Woke Detour Ahead

Before shooting up Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, Dylann Roof "spent months visiting local museums and plantations and churches, including Mother Emanuel," Beverly Gage writes in This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History. "When the police arrived, his car was strewn with travel brochures."

The post Caution: Woke Detour Ahead appeared first on .

No Way To Run a House

If the parties fight each other to a draw in the gerrymandering wars, who wins? Democrats can probably carve about as many safe congressional seats out of blue states as Republicans can out of red states. More safe seats means narrower partisan majorities. In those conditions, losing just a few votes can be fatal, so the advantage belongs to whichever party is better at keeping its members onside.

The post No Way To Run a House appeared first on .

Unfortunate Son

Our country's long fascination with the Weather Underground—the terrorist group that came out of the New Left radical group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—evidently continues. Hollywood has been obsessed. In 1988 Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty—whose lead characters were based on the WU leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn—earned Naomi Foner an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. Then in 2012, director Robert Redford directed and acted in The Company You Keep. In press tours, Redford described the real WU as only a passionate anti-Vietnam war group. Finally, 2025's Academy Award for best feature film went to One Battle After Another, which depicts the remnants of a WU-type group, and whose title was taken from an actual WU "communique" issued by Bernardine Dohrn to its members.

The post Unfortunate Son appeared first on .

The Untold Cost of the Cambridge Five

The British obsession with the spies who worked for the Soviet Union from the 1930s until the early 1950s rivals the American fascination with the case of Alger Hiss. Recruited from Cambridge University, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross have been analyzed, interpreted, and puzzled over in scores of books and articles. How had Soviet intelligence agencies managed to suborn members of the country's elite, educated at its finest universities and entrusted with positions of power and influence? For years they betrayed their country, the organizations in which they worked, and many of their friends by transmitting secrets and confidential information to Joseph Stalin's totalitarian regime.

The post The Untold Cost of the Cambridge Five appeared first on .