Jenny Uglow

Fascism’s Poster Girl

Edda Mussolini was once considered “the most dangerous woman in Europe,” but did she have real political power?

Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Hilary Mantel’s novels and short stories demonstrated that while the historical record can tell us what people did, only fiction can imagine what they felt and thought.

Silences and Scars

Two new books on Berlin track the city through decades of growth, economic desperation, artistic innovation, Nazi terror, political division, and reunification.

Lear’s Lyrical Coasts

The seascapes that Edward Lear sketched on his travels around the Mediterranean are thresholds and boundaries that ask: To stay, or go?

Out of His Element

In a new selection of John James Audubon’s oceangoing writings, we sense his obsessive quest to draw every bird he saw, even though he disliked being on the water.

A Master of Ambiguity

Hans Holbein evoked his subjects with uncanny verisimilitude, but leaves us to guess at his opinions of them.

Europe’s Great Emporium

Sixteenth-century Antwerp was alive with entrepreneurial merchants, rapacious moneylenders, whispering spies, and heretical ideas.

Veronese Preserv’d

Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy

How a Venetian masterpiece ended up in the Louvre.

Contagious Constitutions

Linda Colley shows in her new book that written constitutions developed both as a means of shoring up entrenched rulers and of turning successful rebellions into legitimate governments.

The Reader of Rocks

William Smith’s innovative use of the fossil record helped him create the first detailed geological map of England, Wales, and Scotland.

The Imperial Gardener

How Joseph Banks made the royal garden at Kew the most outstanding botanical collection in the world.

They Made London Their Own

A new book traces the multitudinous contributions of migrants to the capital, as well as their persistent exploitation.

Pandemic Journal

Dispatches from around the world documenting the coronavirus outbreak

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, and more.

Garden of Painterly Delights

We are fed up with snow and floods and sad, bad news. In tune with this mood, thank goodness, the Garden Museum in Lambeth is showing an exhibition called “Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939.”

David Bomberg’s ‘Desire to Emancipate’

Shocking his tutors, Bomberg was a blazing radical, influenced by Italian Futurists and by the Cubist experiments of artists he met in Paris on a trip with Jacob Epstein in 1913, including Picasso and Modigliani.

What the Weather Is

Beauty in Ingenuity: The Art of Science

A sense of excitement defines the exhibition, “The Art of Innovation: From Enlightenment to Dark Matter,” as visitors zig-zag through 250 years of art and science.

William Blake's Visionary Imagination

The Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, the first major exhibition in nearly twenty years, shows 300 of his prints and paintings, with manuscripts and printed books, gathered from galleries and libraries across the world.