There is a recurring aversion on the part of American labels to foreign singers, and it sometimes amounts to a mutual distrust. ... Read and comment | Read original article

Though usually pegged as a conservative, the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) was, in fact, too original for his own go... Read and comment | Read original article

Shakespeare had his tacky side—an innate showmanship that kept audience members in their seats at the Globe. He knew what ... Read and comment | Read original article

The metaphorical resonances of an archeological dig are put to fine use in this tense novel. Ben Mercer has fled his failed marr... Read and comment | Read original article

In the early seventies, a young unpublished writer returns to his native South Africa after a disgrace abroad. His name is John ... Read and comment | Read original article

Slater, in this enormously detailed biography, gives a vivid sense of Dickens’s quotidian existence, and when he isn’... Read and comment | Read original article

This painstakingly researched biography of the seventeenth-century scientist Robert Boyle outlines a life in which “scienc... Read and comment | Read original article

Late one cold November night, in the suburbs of New York, a thirty-one-year-old blonde was sobbing on her bathroom floor. She di... Read and comment | Read original article