Nicholas Orme— This is a scene from a fifteenth-century stained-glass window at Doddiscombsleigh: a country church in Devon, in the south-west of England. It shows what would have been a familiar event. A baby is brought to church to be baptized. The ceremony takes place at a font: a stone
MaryAnne Stevens– Spring in Jølster presents a view of the Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup’s farm-garden at Sandalstrand (now Astruptunet) in Western Norway. It epitomizes his life and his art, referencing his personal expression of European modernism, horticultural ambitions, and commitment to conservation and the expression of national identity. Nikolai Astrup
Jan Lucassen— One of the anomalies of our times is the urgent demand for laboring bodies, alongside the denial of their humanity. Think of severe immigration restrictions in Japan, Europe, the USA, and Australia and inequalities in the Gulf States. In the light of a quickly ageing population and rising
Susan Tomes— A history of the piano in only 100 pieces—how can that be? Doesn’t the piano have one of the most extensive literatures of music written for any instrument? In reality, one would need thousands of choices to do justice to the piano music of the last 250 years.
Hector Guimard (1867-1942) was one of France’s greatest Art Nouveau architect/designers. In an exhibition organized by the Richard H. Driehaus Museum in Chicago and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, accompanied by a gorgeous catalogue, seven distinguishedscholars share their research and knowledge of Guimard. The book’s insightful essays
Joel E. Dimsdale— When I tell people I am interested in brainwashing, I get mixed responses. “Isn’t that kind of a stale, musty topic—Communists, bad science, and all that stuff?” That’s fair: brainwashing has some of those characteristics. It is an old phenomenon, linked to religious conversion and torture. It
Bentley Layton— The Gospel according to Thomas (“The Gospel of Thomas”) is an anthology of 114 “obscure sayings” of Jesus, which, according to its prologue, were collected and transmitted by St. Didymus Jude Thomas. The sayings do not appear within a biographical narrative about Jesus, although some of them individually
Kevin Madigan— Around 1870, evangelical Christians, as their Catholic adversaries would put it, “invaded” Italy in large numbers. Before unification and the inception of a new liberal order, the extension of rights of toleration to Jews and non-Catholic Christians, and the dispossession of the papal states, Protestant missionaries, by and
Considered a modern classic, this New York Times bestseller by the award-winning journalist Ahmed Rashid provides an early glimpse into the history of the Taliban. Ahmed Rashid— The links between the Taliban and some of the extreme Pakistani Deobandi groups are solid because of the common ground they share. Several