Books, Arts, and Culture

A few years ago, while doing research in southeastern Kansas, I stopped in Independence, a metropolis of around 8,500 on the Verdigris River, and paid a...

Ten years ago China was in the midst of what was being touted as a remarkably predictable and peaceful transfer of power—proof that its authoritarian system...

In 1326 the women of Florence petitioned the Duchess of Calabria to ask her husband the duke to relax legislation preventing them from wearing false hair,...

Sinclair McKay writes at the start of his new book, Berlin, that the city displays its wounds openly, in walls pockmarked by bullets, in ruins and...

“Hell,” wrote Percy Shelley in 1819, “is a city much like London.” A hundred and twenty years later Bertolt Brecht, who fled the Nazis for Santa...