Whitney Ellsworth
Whitney Ellsworth drives up in his early1950s Citroën, the French black classicYou see in old French movies,Super exotic in Cambridge, Massachusetts,And says, “Want to go for...
The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei
As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been...
New England Ecstasies
In 1840 a slightly bewildered and grumpy John Quincy Adams observed in his diary that a young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson, “after failing in the...
‘The Spoils of a Savage War’
The French writer David Diop manages to recount a war he never experienced with the intimacy of a witness. A historian at the University of Pau,...
The Secrets of Others
When the Spanish parliament enacted an amnesty law in 1977, two years after the death of General Francisco Franco, it seemed to fulfill a demand of...
Partial Reports
On January 30, 1972, Gilles Peress was in Northern Ireland photographing a march against internment without trial when British soldiers shot dead thirteen men (a fourteenth...
The End of the Terror
Imagine a government divided between two ferociously opposed political forces, both of which claim the right to power. A crisis develops, with many officials caught between...
Covid’s Economic Mutations
The coronavirus has made fools of us all. Show me a commentator who denies any seriously bad calls over the past two years—predictions that look embarrassingly...
The Freedom of Historical Fiction
Why do we read historical fiction? For one thing, it promises an entry into the past that is richer and more textured than straightforward history, which...
‘I Have Quite Lost My Heart’
When Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West in December 1922, she had just published, at the age of forty, the first of her distinctive novels, Jacob’s Room,...
