Presenting the author's recollection of his childhood in an upper middle-class Jewish home in Berlin, this book focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, all seen from the perspective of a child, a collector, flan^eur, and allegorist in one.
In 1898 the American Regular Army was a small frontier constabulary engaged in skirmishes with Indians and protesting workers. Forty-three years later, in 1941, it was a large modern army ready to wage global war against the Germans and the Japanese. In this social history of Am…
How and why did the French Revolution's lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror? The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution offers a new interpretation of this turning point in world history. Timothy Tackett traces the inexorable…
Following his acclaimed life of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) a…
Even as a young man Benjamin possessed astonishing intellectual range and depth. His topics here include poetry and fiction, drama, philosophy, history, religion, love, violence, morality, mythology, painting and much more.
Throughout his life, James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might, he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. 'Boswell s enlightenment' examines the conflicting credos of reason and faith, progress a…