These two 8“ x 11“ album books are best taken as a combined dose of difficult reality and escapist fantasy. Vertigo (a text-and-picture combination) demolishes the traditional city guide that comforted earlier generations;... Read More

This impressively illustrated companion volume to a forthcoming TV series on the destruction of the Aztec and Inca civilizations and related explorations is necessarily one of high drama and telling contrasts. It is also broad-based and... Read More

“He came on to the stage with simplicity and a certain sort of beauty, and that beautiful diction, and of course, that fabulous voice, which was like a silver trumpet muffled in silk.” So said Alec Guinness of John Gielgud. He was... Read More

“Intelligence” surely deserves a place in this book’s subtitle: it was the quality that enabled Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, universally known as Madame de Pompadour, to become mistress and friend of Louis XV; a sensitive patron of... Read More

“The Monster has struck again” became an expected headline in London’s racy newspapers during 1788?90, appearing over fifty times and filling the minds of respectable women with fear, expectation, or hope. Though the Monster was... Read More

“The erotic contains the least that repels the mind, and the most that inevitably attracts.” So states the Indian sage Abhinavagupta in the headnote of the opening chapter of Garrison’s book on the erotic as a force in the art,... Read More

In broad terms, the Cathar drama was played out between 1150-1250 in the Foix-Toulouse-Albi-Carcassonne-Béziers area of Languedoc. It began with the Cathars’ peaceful rejection of the grasping Roman Catholic Church and its plutocratic... Read More

It takes courage to create a “portrait” of a people; national environments and outlooks change so rapidly that a judicious portrait too easily becomes dismissed as merely judgmental. Paxman had the courage to depict his... Read More