Frederic Raphael

I was a solitary child. I did a lot of reading. The books that kindled my ambition to be a writer were by W. Somerset...

Charlie Chaplin: A Brief LifeBy Peter AckroydNan A. Talese, 304 pages There is a lot to be said for short biographies. Plutarch tabulated the achievements and...

The apotheosis of the movie director Stanley Kubrick, after his death in 1999, has been consummated in a traveling exhibition of his photography and motion-picture...

A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War By Amanda Foreman Random House, 1,008 pages Amanda Foreman has found a lively,...

A Most Dangerous Book By Christopher Krebs W.W. Norton, 303 pages In 98 C.E., Cornelius Tacitus, a young Roman patrician who would mature into the archetypal...

The Jews of San Nicandro By John Davis Yale University Press, 252 pages Apulia is the least typically Italian region of Italy. Facing the Adriatic Sea, it extends...

The End of Everything By David Bergelson, Translated by Joseph Sherman Yale, 312 pages David Bergelson was a writer whose life was more dramatic, and fate more emblematic, than...

Yehuda Halevi By Hillel Halkin Nextbook, 368 pages Yehuda Halevi was probably the finest and certainly the last poet to flourish during the Andalusian convivencia. In that golden...

We went to see Inglourious Basterds at our local cinema in the small town of Sarlat, in southwestern France. Having seen no reviews, I hoped...

We went to see Inglourious Basterds at our local cinema in the small town of Sarlat, in southwestern France. Having seen no reviews, I hoped...

I write this in a Paris hotel bedroom while waiting to see a producer whom I have never met, and never previously heard of, to...