Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen— When in 1656 Rembrandt was forced to declare bankruptcy, a full inventory was made of all of his remaining possessions. Among the paintings, furniture and household goods at the house on the Breestraat, were only twenty-two books. By this time Rembrandt, one of the
Janek Wasserman— Americans searching Amazon’s best-seller list in June 2010 would have encountered a surprising title at the top, above the likes of books by Stieg Larsson, George W. Bush, Malcolm Gladwell, and Michael Lewis: Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. The “Definitive Edition” had appeared in 2007, yet it sold only
John Fabian Witt— While the courts took a middle path, public discourse around contagion remained subject to confusion and hysteria. Sometimes epidemics produced panicked overreach by the state, as in the case of the plague in San Francisco, but at other times stubborn resistance to authority rested on claims of
Owen Bennett-Jones— At around 1 a.m. on 27 December 2007 Benazir Bhutto was told someone would try to kill her that day. The warning came from no lesser a source than the director general of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Despite the late hour, Lieutenant General Nadeem
George Prochnik— What’s life without glory, blazing love affairs, and apple tarts? That’s to say, what is life without song and true liberation for all? Heinrich Heine at thirteen, diminutive and dashing with wavy chestnut hair and a passion for play, charged into the crowd beneath the linden trees of
William G. Thomas III— The poplars swayed high above Edward Queen and Charles Mahoney on that May morning. The summer heat crawled up from the Patuxent River, summoned from its slack banks and slow bends, drawing its oppressive punch from the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. To the
Christina of Hane— Although it is somewhat embarrassing to write about how she overcame her enemy and how she kept the treasure of her chastity unstained, it is still a sign of her great love. That is why I cannot possibly ignore it and I have to write something about
David Western— Over the course of barely two centuries, subsistence herding and farming societies tied to rainfall and the seasons have coalesced into a global society and interwoven economy. Amboseli, situated beneath the rising mass of Kilimanjaro in Kenya, gives a snapshot of the last vestiges of the Neolithic Age
Jonathan Rée— Without books, according to Hobbes, we could not be ‘excellently wise’, but on the other hand we would not be ‘excellently foolish’ either. “They which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little summs into a greater, without considering whether those little summes were rightly
Jack M. Balkin— The two important federal challenges brewing in the courts—the struggle over California’s Proposition 8 and the challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act—converged on the Supreme Court’s docket in the election year of 2012. In the California case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Supreme Court held 5–4 that