The works shown in New York City Ballet’s annual Fall Fashion Gala typically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, elevate style (of ...

Suzanna Murawski on Rousseau, Rothko & American literature.

On Trotsky, Diego Rivera & David Alfaro Siqueiros in Mexico City.

What’s so bad about having a mentally deficient ruler? Surely the ruler’s advisors can make wise decisions and tell him what to say? When I hear such reasoning, I think of Tsar Nicholas II, his sad ...

On The Light of Battle by Michel Paradis. As a young man Eisenhower seemed to be searching for a father figure to compensate ...

In some parts of America, they speak an English that’s more English than the English. In 2006, in Sago, West Virginia, I ...

Everyone knows about Aesop and his fables, but few have ever read straight through any serious collection of them, never mind Ben Edwin Perry’s unsurpassed Aesopica of 1952, which assembles 725, along ...

On Herald of a Restless World by Emily Herring. To help answer we are guided by a fine new book, Emily Herring’s Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People. 1 There ...

“We gave the world new ways to dream,” backed by a lilting, repeated musical phrase, is the defining refrain of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard (at the St. James Theatre, and styled “Sunset ...

We have known composers who conduct, but conduct mainly their own music: Stravinsky, for example, or Copland. We have known composers who are also big-league conductors: Bernstein, Previn, Boulez.

An obolus is a small silver coin the Greeks placed under the tongues of the dead so they could pay Charon as he ferried them across the river Styx to the underworld. Andrew Rickard named his ...