CategoryBIOGRAPHY

When she was in high school in the early 1950’s, Joanna Russ (1930–2011) read Mark Twain’s short story  “A Medieval Romance,” about a duke without a male heir who brings his daughter up to fill the role, hiding her gender from all. Things get complicated when the duke’s niece falls in love with his “son,” threatening to reveal her true identity and upset the succession. Russ, who would go on to...

Before invading Ukraine, Russia’s President Putin laid out his justification for military action in long, angry speeches. Among false claims about Ukrainian atrocities against Russians and his well-worn lament about encroaching Western influence, he invoked a past “since time immemorial” when the people living within what he considers the artificially drawn borders of Ukraine “called themselves...

“People believe what they want to believe,” wrote David Cornwell to one of his lovers. “ALWAYS.” He was referring to the “revelation” that Graham Greene had continued working for British intelligence into his seventies. “No good me telling them that GG was far too drunk to remember anything, & that his residual connections with the Brit spooks were romantic fantasy.” When he wrote that...

This: the suffering, the grit and hardship of everyday life, never once appeared in Balanchine’s dances. It did not interest him—it was pedestrian, a degradation of the human body and spirit. Even the dead bodies in his ballets were set against a backdrop of eternity and had a sense of spirituality and redemption that elevated the body out of the ordinary—dead bodies, yes, but really dead souls...

W.H. Auden has become so central to my life over the past forty years that there never appears to have been a time that it could have been otherwise. He is, for me, a talismanic touchstone. My conversation has become so peppered with quotes from his work and about his life that I am frequently asked when I first met him. I was still at school in Ireland when he died in 1973. His niece married an...

The Journey That Matters is a series of six short videos from Arwen Curry, the director and producer of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a Hugo Award-nominated 2018 feature documentary about the iconic author. In the final installment of the series, Julie Phillips reflects on “He’s My First Reader,” in which Ursula and her husband, Charles, discuss how their division of household labor helped Ursula...

When Hilary Mantel died, unexpectedly, in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, in September 2022, she was a week away from moving to Kinsale, Ireland, a reconnection with her Irish Catholic roots. She and her husband Gerald McEwen had bought a house with views over the surrounding countryside. At the heart of this collection is a piece about the writer John McGahern, the great chronicler of Irish rural...

The Journey That Matters is a series of six short videos from Arwen Curry, the director and producer of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a Hugo Award-nominated 2018 feature documentary about the iconic author. In the fifth of the series, Theo Downes-Le Guin introduces “Where I Write,” an intimate peek into Ursula’s study and her writing process. Recently I viewed an online video titled I Tried Ursula...

For most participants of the Paris Peace Conference, including most of the Americans present, there was no question that Woodrow Wilson bore primary responsibility for the failed ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and its consequences for the world. Such has been the verdict of scholars as well. In Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (1945), historian Thomas A. Bailey summed up Wilson as...

She has become my Mary. This is something I’ve repeated in interviews since my novel about the teenage years of Mary Shelley was first published (in 2021 in The Netherlands, where I’m from). And I meant it too, although at the time I hadn’t really considered it before. But it rang true. I never set out to write a historical novel. I never felt particularly attracted to writing a novel about...