Historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett (1902-1975) was one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary political observers. Through an ability to make important connections, he became an authority on Germany in the interwar years and was acquainted wit...

Armed with only early boyhood memories, Lawrence P. Jackson begins his quest by setting out from his home in Baltimore for Pittsylvania County, Virginia, to try to find his late grandfather's old home by the railroad tracks in Blairs".My Father's Nam...

A book of heroic dimensions, this is the first full-length biography of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century – a man as fascinating, difficult, and compelling as the paintings he produced. Drawing on exclusive access to Mark Rothko's...

Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. In "documentary", she wrote, real things "lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens". If film, for Tait,...

Young Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States for the first time in May 1831, commissioned by the French government to study the American prison system. For the next nine months he and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, travelled and obse...

The seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) is one of the most intriguing figures in English literature. A noted civil servant under Cromwell's Protectorate, he has been variously identified as a patriot, spy, conspirator, concealed homos...

As the New York Yankees' star centre fielder from 1936 to 1951, Joe DiMaggio is enshrined in America's memory as the epitome in sports of grace, dignity, and that ineffable quality called "class". But his career after retirement, starting with his ni...

With complete transcripts of the distress messages, "Titanic Calling" vividly brings to life the voices of the individuals in this drama, retelling the legendary story as it was first heard. The narrative begins with warnings of ice, including sever...

Subversive, funny, and effortlessly droll, Jules Feiffer's cartoons were all over New York in the 1960s and '70s – featured in the "Village Voice", but also cut out and pinned to bulletin boards in offices and on refrigerators at home. Feiffer descri...

The work of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), one of Russia's great modern poets, has been the subject of much study and debate. His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the...