Volume 69, Issue 6 (2022-04-07)

Fintan O’Toole

The Last of Her Kind

Angela Merkel emerged from the ruins of the Eastern bloc as a spectacular example of the way the collapse of an old regime might create a much more benign sense of opportunity.

The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel

by Kati Marton

Colin Grant

A Country Out of Control

In Wole Soyinka’s laceratingly satirical new novel, Nigeria has lost its way and is inured to corruption and violence.

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

by Wole Soyinka

Linda Greenhouse

Should We Reform the Court?

A recent report commissioned by President Biden lets the public in on the fact that the legal academy is close to giving up on the Supreme Court.

Final Report

by the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States

Colin B. Bailey

A Compulsive Perfectionist

The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor.

The Letters of Edgar Degas

bilingual edition edited and annotated by Theodore Reff

Howard W. French

Slavery, Empire, Memory

For nearly two centuries Britain has attempted to minimize the importance of slavery to its economic prosperity.

Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain

by Padraic X. Scanlan

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

Ingrid D. Rowland

Caught in the Coils

In Hans von Trotha’s haunting novel, the Gestapo is rounding up the Jews of Rome, but the archaeologist Ludwig Pollak refuses sanctuary in the Vatican and wishes only to recount his memories.

Pollak’s Arm

by Hans von Trotha, translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer

Fred Kaplan

‘A Bridge Too Far’

Even the most ardent advocates of NATO expansion after the implosion of the USSR realized that it had limits—and one of those limits was Ukraine.

Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate

by M.E. Sarotte

Ange Mlinko

His Nemesis Was Stupidity

Baudelaire thought the scope of his influence would be limited by the perfection of his poetry, which sailed over the heads of the masses.

Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed

by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French and edited by Richard Sieburth

The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal)

by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French by Aaron Poochigian, with an introduction by Dana Gioia and an afterword by Daniel Handler

The Salon of 1846

by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French by Jonathan Mayne, with an introduction by Michael Fried

Ariel Dorfman

The Futility of Censorship

Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas focuses on heroes and heroines who refused to allow their freedom of expression to be extinguished.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News

by Eric Berkowitz

Suzanne Buffam

Letters from a Scattered Place

John McGahern’s plain prose hides a pileup of cruelties and injustices.

The Letters of John McGahern

edited by Frank Shovlin

Elvia Wilk

Corpus Meets Corpse

The intricate and densely referential video work of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley confronts standard history with the fact of the body.

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: Blood Moon

an exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, September 24, 2021–April 3, 2022

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

An Unexpectedly Modern Monarch

Despite his mundane outlook and stiff conventionality, George V may have ensured the survival of the British monarchy in a turbulent century.

George V: Never a Dull Moment

by Jane Ridley

Yuri Andrukhovych,
John Hennessy,
Ostap Kin

The centrality and vitality of the Ramayana in Indian culture today, its enormous historical importance and continued use in mythological historicizing, can be only roughly approximated in Europe and America by the Bible.

The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: The Complete English Translation

translated from the Sanskrit by Robert P. Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Rosalind Lefeber, Sheldon I. Pollock, and Barend A. van Nooten; and revised and edited by Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman

Emily Raboteau

The Stories of the Bronx

How did the South Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s come to symbolize slumdom all over the world when its problems could be found in any other deindustrializing American city?

Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin

by Peter L’Official

Tim Judah