Books, Arts, and Culture

On March 17, 1709, Antoine Galland, the French translator of The Thousand and One Nights, wrote in his diary of meeting in Paris a certain “Hanna,”...

Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about...

Even among the eccentric annals of poets who talked to God, angels, tutelary spirits, and disincorporated souls, Fernando Pessoa is a special case. The architect of...

I’ve never met Macon Fry but I often meet his goats, Inky and Dinky. Every weekend—at least before Hurricane Ida shipped us on an all-expenses-unpaid vacation...

In the past thirty years a scholarly revolution has altered our notion of the first thousand years of Christianity. We no longer see it as an...

Charles Dickens was a great coiner of words—over four hundred, according to the Oxford English Dictionary—but “monopolylogue” was not among them. Credit for that particular invention...

“American history is haunted by nightbirds in the nineteenth century,” Lewis Mumford wrote in The Brown Decades, his landmark 1931 study of Gilded Age culture. Chief...