In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who…
In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who…
In mid-October 1956 I became a visitor to the Middle Ages: I matriculated at Oxford. Robed in gown and white tie (mysteriously called “sub-fusc"), I stood with other freshmen before the celebrated classicist Sir Maurice Bowra, who intoned ritual sentences of Anglo-Latin (no broad "A"s) and we…
In my time at Jesus College, Oxford (1956-58), I must have passed Eric Kennington’s evocative bust of T. E. Lawrence scores of times. It stood in the college lodge, on Turl Street, and portrayed a famous alumnus who had led an early life as an archaeologist before he became a British officer and…
In my time at Jesus College, Oxford (1956-58), I must have passed Eric Kennington’s evocative bust of T. E. Lawrence scores of times. It stood in the college lodge, on Turl Street, and portrayed a famous alumnus who had led an early life as an archaeologist before he became a British officer and…
Some eight miles west by south of the central North Carolina town of my boyhood, one comes upon red-clay dairy country, furnished with lush pastures and comfortable houses. Hawfields, as the neighborhood is called, dates from colonial times: The route of Cornwallis’s fateful retirement toward…
My youth in the very Protestant North Carolina of the 1940s was suffused with Bible translation. One version stood supreme and virtually alone: the King James, or Authorized, version of 1611, whose words and rhythms remain the stuff of memory. Schooldays, their rituals as yet uncensured by the…
My youth in the very Protestant North Carolina of the 1940s was suffused with Bible translation. One version stood supreme and virtually alone: the King James, or Authorized, version of 1611, whose words and rhythms remain the stuff of memory. Schooldays, their rituals as yet uncensured by the…
Among the writers who have had a consequential effect on the issue of race in America, Albion W. Tourgée (1838-1905) may be the least noticed, for reasons unclear. This is the latest of several recent treatments of his life and work that have left him, still, in unmerited obscurity. Perhaps one…
In the classical Greek scheme of things, hubris—overweening pride—was a lurking trap for headstrong humans, not least such extraordinary figures as King Oedipus. Along with nemesis, its personified enforcer, hubris was a chronic susceptibility of the human temperament woven into the cosmic order.
It is Elaine Parsons’s purpose in this timely book to measure the structure and impact of the "first" Ku Klux Klan, from its beginnings as an ex-Confederate officers' lark in middle Tennessee through its metastasis into a secretive and vicious force of murder, arson, and terror.
Those who venture upon the heights of Mount Proust are well aware that his fame in the English-speaking world owes much to a Scots translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Proust’s masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, certainly among the half-dozen literary classics of the 20th century, with its…
At intervals in his abbreviated life, John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865) apparently pictured himself as a man of destiny—although when, on one occasion, he exclaimed, “I must have fame,” he was presumably thinking of the family craft (acting) and not murder. But like so many of the memories that crowd…
For most historians most of the time, reach exceeds grasp—necessarily so, for reasons intrinsic to the craft. Save for its occasional grandmaster, a Gibbon or a Namier, past mysteries lie too deeply embedded to be definitively solved in a later age. The Man Who Would Not Be Washington provides a…
If you are one of the growing number of older Americans who scan the newspaper obituaries of strangers—at what age did the Grim Reaper strike, and how?—Atul Gawande’s new book is for you. But it is not for the elderly alone. This is the fourth of the Boston surgeon’s book-length discussions of…
What’s not to admire bout the Danes, a people honored for their rescue of endangered Jews in World War II and an astonishing linguistic facility? When you throw in Hamlet and the great ur-classic of Englit, Beowulf, which both take place on Danish soil, it seems almost incidental that they were…
If ever a topic was born familiar, this book would qualify. The paradox is easily explained. The title of this collection of essays embodies a truth that would have been undeniable before the age of technology swept over us. At the obvious level, there is the eternal human need for familiar…
It is unlikely that any debut in the field of military history will rival that of John Keegan’s masterpiece The Face of Battle (1976) nearly four decades ago. It was not his first book, or even his first good one. But it was, and remains, definitively brilliant and original.
If this painting isn’t iconic, the term should be banished from the vocabulary of art. Forget, for a moment, Mona Lisa’s smile and the Sistine Creator transmitting the spark of life to Adam. Set aside what was to come, including Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). They, obviously, have…
Winston Groom’s legendary Forrest Gump is the iconic bystander who stumbles into the company of historically significant figures—and even, in the case of Elvis, supplies signature bodily gyrations. What follows will claim no such force or influence. But when it comes to unusual brushes with…
Since mine is hardly a household name, I can count on a few fingers the occasions when I’ve been interviewed. But one encounter remains as clear as the day it happened.
This is an age of mystifying book titles, including the one that adorns this memoir.
Visitors guided to Jane Austen’s handsome burial marker in Winchester Cathedral, as I was one June day some years ago, may gaze with surprise, as I did, at the elaborate inscription. It pays tribute to “the goodness of her heart . . . [and] the extraordinary endowments of her mind,” but makes no…
By all but universal agreement, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) was Henry James’s first masterpiece, a lengthy contemplation of the fate of an orphaned American girl who falls victim to European manners and morals—the first great articulation of his “international theme.”
On the strength of half-a-century’s work with newspaper people, I can confidently say that no cadre of that tribe is subject to greater superstition than Washington reporters. It seems a settled prejudice that all reporters, everywhere, are puffed-up Pulitzer-seekers and partisans in disguise,…
This superb revisionist study suggests to me that its subject, once the cynosure of writerly interest, may soon emerge from a long eclipse. No American writer was more obsessively studied and imitated half a century ago. Then Ernest Hemingway fell as far from fashion as any great writer ever does.…
When Reynolds Price died in January 2011, after a gallant battle of three decades with disabling spinal cancer and chronic pain, he left an uncompleted fourth volume of reminiscences. Its quality, notwithstanding its abrupt end, bears testimony to his gifts: His literary exit is almost as striking…
April seventh, 1928: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back…
As the perpetrator of two historical novels and other fictional pieces that place real people in imaginary situations, I can’t be sanctimonious about what follows. But my history genes are in turmoil over the new play about Joe Alsop, the late Washington columnist, and the commentary the play,…
We recently reached a landmark in the checkered annals of social science: the 47th anniversary of an initially obscure paper that few living Americans have heard of, and fewer read. That epochal document has been known since the summer of 1965 as “the Moynihan Report,” when it was so dubbed by the…
A learned friend of rather retro views likes to muse from time to time on the North America that might have been: a balkanized continent without the miniature tribalisms that have plagued the actual Balkans, which, so said a Saki character, “produce more history than they can consume locally.” In…
Given the everlasting cascade of books about Abraham Lincoln, is anything at all left to be said? Perhaps. We sometimes overlook Lincoln’s pivotal role as a cause—or at least a provocation—of the war. Without his election, would hostilities have broken out? A hypothetical question, of course, but…
In How the Scots Invented the Modern World, Arthur Herman posed a bold but credible claim. But there was a major omission: The game of golf, which, with steam engines and classical economics, also originated in the foggy reaches of the Celtic fringe. The royal and ancient game, moreover, suffers…
Visual memories, especially those of boyish vintage, tend to be inexact but I am pretty confident of this one: Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton was a short, gnomish, balding figure, longtime chairman of the history department at the University of North Carolina, and founder of the great Southern…
From Battlefields Rising
Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe’s second novel, and I came into the world within months of one another 75 years ago. But infants know nothing of stories and it would be years before I began to gulp down Wolfe’s fiction and couple my destiny, in imagination, with that of his gangling hero,…
Macaulay
In Defense of Thomas Jefferson
Wars Within a War
In The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1960), Merrill Peterson of the University of Virginia patented a new kind of history--the history of a great reputation. Peterson traced the "image" of Jefferson as it evolved and showed that Jefferson had been a mirror in which each age saw itself…
Ardent Spirits
The 400th anniversary of the first publication of Shakespeare's sonnets slipped silently by, all but unnoticed, in late May and early this month. But that is perhaps routine, since like all things Shakespearian, his sonnets are hedged in still-unsolved mystery.
The Catholic Side of Henry James
At last reliable count, Abraham Lincoln had been the subject of more books than any historical figure other than Jesus of Nazareth--running with scarcely a pause for breath from the quirky portrait assembled by his former law partner "Billy" Herndon. With the advent of his bicentennial year,…
How Fiction Works
Russian nationalism is back in the news after a welcome lull, and that offers an opportunity to describe my recent, excited reacquaintance with an early chapter in its checkered history.
Even the best political books are in their nature ephemeral, but there are exceptions. One is Theodore H. White's making-of-the-president series, especially the first, on the Kennedy-Nixon contest. Stewart Alsop's The Center, published 40 years ago this spring, and the subject of this reprise, is…
Legacy
Albert Meets America
Senator Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers
The Age of Lincoln
Mellon
The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes
In every writer's secret heart, which is not without tincture of vanity, he covets the kind of letter I received out of the blue from a total stranger one day in July 1963. It suddenly lavished upon me the compliments that every writer believes he deserves and seldom hears.
In the House of the Hangman
When Lewis Powell, who was to become an esteemed Supreme Court justice, came as a freshman to Washington and Lee in the mid-1920s, he noticed a striking photograph in the hallway of his boarding house. The face of Robert E. Lee was instantly recognizable. But who, he asked, was the pretty little…
Collected Stories
Putnam Camp
Descartes
Revolutionary Characters
Pétain
Melville
I HAVE A THEORY, perhaps a bit patronizing, that few readers will recognize the name of Wayne Booth, who died recently, because . . . it doesn't sound literary. T.S. Eliot or Cleanth Brooks? Yes. Wayne Booth? No. More like a banker or realtor.
Away Down South
THERE WAS SOMETHING BEYOND OLD-fashioned--maybe the right word is archaic--about Shelby Foote. It emerged full-blown that evening a decade ago when he appeared in Ken Burns's Civil War series as the best voice of our national Iliad. He recited his anecdotes with a twinkling eye and in that mellow,…
Shadowplay
The Confederate Battle Flag