An Anti-Utopian Life

by | Dec 21, 2015

Isaiah Berlin: A Life, by Michael Ignatieff. New York: Owl Books, 1999. Paper, 356pp., $16. Isaiah Berlin, who died in 1997, was that rare man of letters who was also a man of the world. If Churchill was the statesman who earned laurels as an historian, Berlin was the...

The Deauthorised Life of Ted Hughes

by | Oct 18, 2015

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate. Harper, 2015. Hardcover, 672 pages, $40.Every biography has a backstory involving how a biographer turns to a certain subject, what other biographies have been written, what sources are new or used differently....

A Literary Bloodhound Tracks Eliot

by | Aug 16, 2015

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Hardcover, 493 + xvi pages, $35. As I finished this prodigious tome about “Tom,” a painful question came to mind. What American could have pulled it off? The ideal...

A Lively Half-Life

by | May 4, 2015

The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams by Phyllis Lee Levin. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hardcover, 544 pages, $35. “This, in essence, is the dilemma of John Quincy’s life. Respecting him as a statesman, as ‘Old Man Eloquent’ was one thing. Liking him was...

An Unfinished Memoir

by | Apr 27, 2015

Intrepid Woman: Betty Lussier’s Secret War, 1942–1945 by Betty Lussier. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010. Hardcover, 240 pages, $35.Betty Lussier was born in Canada but raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her father, born in the U.S. but a Canadian citizen,...