Interviews

The Migrant's Tale: Susan Shillinglaw on Why John Steinbeck's Epic, The Grapes of Wrath, is a “Powerful and Ambitious Book”
The Migrant's Tale: Susan Shillinglaw on Why John Steinbeck's Epic, The Grapes of Wrath, is a “Powerful and Ambitious Book”
In the summer of 1937, John Steinbeck traveled to the agricultural labor camps of California's Central Valley and spent weeks among the migrant workers who had fled the Dust Bowl.... Read more...
Waking Up to Finnegans Wake: Finn Fordham on "Textual Complexities" of James Joyce's Most "Absorbing" Novel
Waking Up to Finnegans Wake: Finn Fordham on "Textual Complexities" of James Joyce's Most "Absorbing" Novel
In 1923, James Joyce sat down and wrote the first pages of what he called, for the next sixteen years, Work in Progress. He had just finished Ulysses, a novel that... Read more...
Peter Temin
The Key to Keynes: Peter Temin Analyzes John Maynard Keynes' “Sophisticated and Innovative Economics”
In the summer of 1919, John Maynard Keynes resigned from the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and took the night train to London in a state of moral... Read more...
By His Own Design: Robert Twombly on The Individualism of Frank Lloyd Wright
By His Own Design: Robert Twombly on The Individualism of Frank Lloyd Wright
In 1936, a 68-year-old architect who had not received a significant commission in nearly a decade was handed a modest budget and asked to design a weekend retreat for a... Read more...
Stephen Gaukroger
A “Natural” Philosopher: Stephen Gaukroger on René Descartes' “Twists and Turns of Intellect”
In the winter of 1649, René Descartes received an invitation he had been resisting for years, and finally, against his better judgment, accepted it. Queen Christina of Sweden, one of... Read more...
Question Marx: Ágnes Heller on Continued “Misinterpretations of Karl Marx's Philosophy”
Question Marx: Ágnes Heller on Continued “Misinterpretations of Karl Marx's Philosophy”
In the spring of 1849, Karl Marx was expelled from Prussia, then from France, and finally settled in London with his family and almost nothing else. He spent the next... Read more...
Much Ado About Something: Dennis Kennedy on William Shakespeare's Enduring Global Appeal
Much Ado About Something: Dennis Kennedy on William Shakespeare's Enduring Global Appeal
In 1607, a ship called the Red Dragon anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone on the West African trade routes of the East India Company. The crew, restless and... Read more...
David Chinitz
"A Great Symphony in a Minor Key:" David Chinitz Tunes in to "The Musical Quality" of T.S. Eliot's Writing
In the autumn of 1921, T. S. Eliot checked himself into a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the verge of a breakdown. He was thirty-three years old, exhausted by his... Read more...
“King of the Cats”: Paul Muldoon on the Life and Work of W. B. Yeats
“King of the Cats”: Paul Muldoon on the Life and Work of W. B. Yeats
In the autumn of 1923, William Butler Yeats received a telephone call at his home in Dublin informing him that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He... Read more...
Economy Class: Nicholas Wapshott Explains Why John Maynard Keynes Was Ahead of His Time
Economy Class: Nicholas Wapshott Explains Why John Maynard Keynes Was Ahead of His Time
In the autumn of 1930, John Maynard Keynes sat down and wrote an essay that began with what appeared to be an outrageous prediction. The world was in the grip... Read more...
Charles Rosen
Bach’s Second Coming: Charles Rosen on the Great Bach Revival
On the morning of March 11, 1829, a twenty-year-old conductor named Felix Mendelssohn stood before an orchestra and chorus in the Berlin Singakademie and prepared to perform a work that... Read more...
Nicholas Wapshott
The Road to Hayek: Nicholas Wapshott on the Life and Work of Economist Friedrich Hayek
In the early 1930s, two of the most brilliant economists in the world engaged in a public debate in academic journals that was so fierce, so personal, and so consequential... Read more...