With his usual wit and elan, esteemed historian Peter Gay enters the contentious, long-standing debates over the romantic period. Here, in this concise and inviting volume, he reformulates the definition of romanticism and provides a fresh account of...

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was a Protestant preacher, an influential religious thinker, and an important moral guide in mid-twentieth-century America. But what does he have to say to us now? In what way does he inform the thinking of political lead...

Lionel Trilling, regarded at the time of his death in 1975 as America's preeminent literary critic, is today often seen as a relic of a vanished era. His was an age when literary criticism and ideas seemed to matter profoundly in the intellectual lif...

This deeply informed biography of Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) tells of a man who – both thoroughly German and unabashedly Jewish – rose to leadership in the German War-Ministry Department during the First World War, and later to the exalted position...

<p>In this surprising and highly unconventional work, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet poses a seemingly simple question that yields a thoroughly unexpected answer. The Constitution matters, he argues, not because it structures our government but b...

William Nicholson (1872-1949) is among the most admired and elusive painters in the history of British art. Neither academic nor overtly modernist, his ravishing paintings are a singular achievement of the early twentieth century. Nicholson made his...

"Why Architecture Matters" is not a work of architectural history or a guide to the styles or an architectural dictionary, though it contains elements of all three. The purpose of "Why Architecture Matters" is to "come to grips with how things feel t...

"Why Translation Matters" argues for the cultural importance of translation, and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to sti...

In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attache in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sen...

This is the fourth and final volume in the complete catalogue of the work of William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Included in this handsome book are interiors, primarily paintings of his renowned Tenth Street Studio, and still life paintings, in partic...