From The Adorations:

He looked at the black-bordered picture of the dead Archduke, for whom he felt no pity (an increasingly alien emotion)—indeed, the anticipation of what was already rumored (mobilizations, ambassadors recalled, Austrian troops shelling Belgrade) tingled in his ...

From The Adorations:

Stefanie put down her pen, suddenly aware of distant noise, her attention distracted by a growing commotion outside. The even pitch of traffic sounds had been jarred into dissonance. A concentrated shouting rose from the busy street below, the knotted clamor of ...

Boston Review, which has been my refuge, my soapbox, and my part-time employer for the past 10 years, has published  an essay of mine on Arthur Koestler, here–or, more precisely, an essay of mine on Michael Scammell's biography of Koestler, the reading of which reignited my interest in the great Anglo-Hungarian polymath, whom I revered during my youth. The Scammell bio has been widely reviewed–here, by Christopher Hitchens–and none of the reviewers has failed to observe that Koestl...

Reputations are made here, as in Russia, on political respectability, or by commercial acceptability. The worse the author, the more he is known.

                                                                                                James Purdy (1914–2009)

  At Arthur Rubinstein’s farewell performance at the Usher Hall in Edinbu...

To jump ahead a year in my World War II time line, to June 22-23, 1941, the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, when 4.5 million German and Axis-allied troops  invaded the Soviet Union, Germany's erstwhile ally, with history's largest army. A direct descendant of Napoleon's invasion of ...

When my mother died in March 2002, I was living in Texas and had (and have) the dual responsibilities of family and job, so I was away from her side. But I went over for her funeral, and went back a year later to sell the old house in Ferney-Voltaire. Mother, thankfully, went like th...

            After Dad's funeral I returned temporarily to France and kept my mother company at her expense. Then, ever on the move, I headed back to New York via Reykjavik, Iceland, on Icelandair, in those days the airline of choice for penurious trans-Atlantic travelers. A bli...

 Not long after I moved to New York I renewed contact with my father in Delaware, at first to touch him for cash, then I started going down to visit him on weekends with increasing and more relaxed frequency as it became apparent that we were more or less congenial, especially if...

A useful caveat from the ever-useful Clive James (whose endlessly entertaining website is a panacea for those long dull afternoons at the office):

"The perpetual dimwit-left consensus will disgust any liberal eventually, but the trick is to reclaim the democratic centre, not to take re...

For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and ...

The 29th Infantry Division trained in Scotland and England for the crosschannel invasion, October 1942-June 1944. Teamed with the 1st Division, a regiment of the 29th Division (116th Infantry) was in the first assault wave to hit the beaches at Normandy on D-day, 6 June 1944. Landing on Omaha Beach on the same day in the face of intense enemy fire, the Division soon secur...

As part of my homage to the memory of fallen France, I'm posting this excerpt from my as-yet unpublished novel The Adorations, which deals, among many other things, with that cataclysmic event in June, 1940.

           Paying attention, are we, o influential editors and publishin...