Merve Emre The Act of Persuasion The drama of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life emanated from an elemental restlessness and a desire for sovereignty over her intellect and emotion. April 21, 2022 issue
Simon Callow Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pianist Jeremy Denk’s memoir is not just about piano lessons but about life lessons—how the artist creates a self. April 21, 2022 issue
Michael Gorra Being Dickens Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers. April 21, 2022 issue
Benjamin Nathans Bureaucrat’s Honor Three memoirs by Trump administration officials reveal the integrity and moral discipline of the so-called deep state in the face of corruption and philistinism. April 21, 2022 issue
Geoffrey Wheatcroft An Unexpectedly Modern Monarch Despite his mundane outlook and stiff conventionality, George V may have ensured the survival of the British monarchy in a turbulent century. April 7, 2022 issue
Colin B. Bailey A Compulsive Perfectionist The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor. April 7, 2022 issue
Clair Wills Letters from a Scattered Place John McGahern’s plain prose hides a pileup of cruelties and injustices. April 7, 2022 issue
Roya Hakakian The Refugee’s Internal Exile Our family had to flee Iran after 1979 and settle in the US, but in his imagination my father never left. Only I, by burying him here, have put down roots that he lost. March 20, 2022
Christine Henneberg The Good Mother Jazmina Barrera and Angela Garbes consider the emotional and political fallout of pregnancy and motherhood. August 18, 2022 issue
Cintra Wilson Downtown Confessional John Lurie’s memoir is a tell-all that settles old accounts and names names, a cantankerous lament over his many existential and terrestrial irritations. August 18, 2022 issue
Clare Bucknell ‘So Whimsical a Head’ A new biography of Charles Lamb, the first in over a century, marks an important staging post on the writer’s road back to respectability. August 18, 2022 issue
Sarah Blackwood Spiritual Exercises In her most recent graphic novel, Alison Bechdel explores her lifelong obsession with fitness. July 21, 2022 issue
Lynn Hunt I, the People Was Robespierre proof that violent revolution in the name of rights and social justice could only result in terror and authoritarianism? June 23, 2022 issue
George B. Stauffer Alban Berg’s Dissonances Berg’s music, with its lyrical combination of tonal and atonal techniques, is closer to late Romanticism than to the strict modernism of his contemporaries Schoenberg and Webern. June 23, 2022 issue
James Mann The Birchers & the Trumpers A new biography of Robert Welch traces the origins and history of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era. June 23, 2022 issue
Yuri Slezkine ‘He Loved Handing Out Decorations’ The admiring biographer of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union’s most memorably inconspicuous leader, finds him an affable heartthrob who longed for peace “with every fibre of his body.” June 9, 2022 issue
Gavin Francis The Babel Within Two memoirs consider what’s gained and lost when a new language is acquired and a mother tongue is all but forgotten. May 26, 2022 issue
Regina Marler The Bucolic Heroic Catherine Hewitt’s Art Is a Tyrant is a full depiction of the nineteenth-century painter Rosa Bonheur’s unconventional life. May 12, 2022 issue