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em>The initial reactions by Rembrandt specialists to the Cotswolds painting were nearly all marked by caution.
Read MoreBy Bill Marx and Harvey Blume I was asked by National Public Radio’s Morning Edition to write an appreciation of the late Norman Mailer. I have posted an unabridged version of this necessarily short piece. After that, I have placed an interview Harvey Blume had with Mailer after the publication of his 1995 book Oswald’s…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume If you want to get a glimpse of a Joseph Stalin you likely had never conceived of before, just turn to the mug shot taken of him by Tsarist police in 1912 or some of the other photos in Sebag Montefiore fascinating, radically revisionist new biography Young Stalin. This Stalin is no…
Read MoreBrazenly predictable, fearlessly anachronistic, Ronan Noone’s Brendan, which is receiving its world premiere production from the Huntington Theatre Company, is the kind of inspirational tearjerker comedy that is pleasant enough to sit through but damned depressing to think about.
Read MoreEdmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (Paperback) By Lewis M. Dabney. Johns Hopkins University Press, 672 pages, $25. Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s (Library of America #176) By Edmund Wilson. Edited by Lewis M. Dabney. 1026 pages, $40. Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s (Library of America #177)…
Read MoreThere’s a chess opening called the Grob, fully as distasteful as the name might suggest. When white plays the Grob he’s showing disrespect, not only to his opponent but to the game. The Grob does nothing to advance white’s position on the board. That, in fact, is its strength, the one and only thing the…
Read MoreBack in the ’30s, Philip Rahv memorably divided American fiction writers into redskins and palefaces — Mark Twain epitomized the wild men, Henry James the civilized — a chasm that today may be outmoded or politically indelicate. But Lewis M. Dabney’s fine biography of Edmund Wilson suggests that when it comes to assessing literary critics…
Read Moreby Harvey Blume Ex-Catholic nun Karen Armstrong has, in her long, productive second career as scholar, written 21 books, including A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and engaging, balanced biographies of Buddha and Muhammed. I interviewed her about the Buddha biography when it came out in 2001 and enjoyed…
Read MoreDoris Lessing has always been massively and productively incorrect, and splendidly fulfills the mandate of a great writer by being so.
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Arts Commentary: “The Boston Globe” Has Nothing to Worry About …
Who cares how the chairs are arranged or even who sits on them on the deck of the Titanic-“Globe”? As the popularity of online publications and blogs grows, the “Globe”’s tepid cultural coverage has become increasingly superfluous.
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