A. J. Liebling wrote wonderful columns about food for The New Yorker in a time when food writing was seldom considered suitable for anything but the women’s pages. His account of being an impoverished art student in interwar Paris and choosing between good food and good wine is memorable, and is also a modern morality.
A beautiful book of immense erudition and perception, this book has influenced my work deeply. It does things I did not think possible, and draws connections I did not think could be drawn. Yet, it is plainspoken, considerate, and unfailingly entertaining.
A fascinating study of Vienna between the wars and its immense contributions to modernism and to computing. Vienna was a huge capital city that governed what had become a small country. Austria had lost her empire and her markets, the economy had been shredded, and vast numbers of people from the former provinces converged on a city with insufficient housing, a place that had long seen itself as governed by schleppers. Yet, for a decade, it became the intellectual center of the world, before the Viennese threw it all away for the satisfactions of Fascism.
From 1912 to 1915, Venetia Stanley, then inn her 20s, carried on an intense, primarily epistolary, romance with Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, who was considerably older. He called Venetia “dearest”; she called him “Prime”. He wrote to her several times a day, often including state secrets in the letters. Incredibly, his half of the correspondence survives. From these letter. Robert Harris has crafted a thriller which is often fascinating, if inevitably tinged with sadness.
A wonderful and thorough history of the intersecting philosophical and mathematical circles in Vienna from the early 1920s to their end in Austrian Fascism and the Anschluss. Sigmund offers sensitive and intelligent portrayals of the most notable participants (though he rather neglect John von Neumann) as well as those who, like the note-taking Dr. Rose Rand, were ill-treated in life and neglected afterward. This deserves special praise because, in this broad group biography, few of the characters are easy to identify with. Sigmund is equally at home with the ideas with which these circles wrestled, and if he occasionally despairs of explaining set theory to a general audience, his effort to explain Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem by way of Sudoko is both clever and effective.
A delightful and fascinating contemplation of two threads that run through nearly three thousand years of historical writing. Herodotus tries to tell us about the world; if he knows something interesting about a place he will tell you about it. Thucydides tries to tell us what happened in the great war in which he himself played a part; if something important happened when he was elsewhere, he works to find a source who knows about it. If it wasn’t important to the war, to hell with it. Thucydides became the patron of historians, Herodotus the patron of antiquarians; Momigliano, a historian, is gracious to antiquarians and fast to point out that, today, some of the most interesting and important historical writing is attuned to Herodotus while we may have had our fill of political and military chronicles.
Ruskin was an early Modernist critic and a great fan of Turner’s brilliant colors. Whistler was a late modernist, eager to explore fog and darkness. They did not like each other, and Ruskin eventually took the opportunity to deplore Whistler’s painting.
Whistler, who was having a terrible time getting people interested in his experimental painting, sued for libel. The result was a spectacular trial, which Murphy covers very well indeed. Whistler still couldn't sell his work; eventually, he did manage to make some big sales to Americans, and some of his critical work now hangs in the Harvard Art Museums.
