Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
He travelled the fledgling United States shooting birds, wiring them into poses, and then painting them for eternity - he was John James Audubon, and his epic "The Birds of America" has a beautiful, gargantuan new edition from Abbeville Press
Read MoreVenice has traded flinty commercial acumen and world-weary merchant princes for an ennui worthy of M. John Harrison's science fiction; her profession has now become the art of insubstantiality. For centuries authors have tried and failed to capture her. Steve Donoghue surveys the glorious wreckage.
Read More"The proper function of a critic is to save a tale from the artist who created it" wrote D. H. Lawrence, but sometimes - most of the time - despite the best efforts of the best critics, both tale and artist disappear. What do we do with the criti-cal darlings of yesteryear, now filling the library bargain sale? And what of the critics, who called them imperishable?
Read MoreBen Jonson said that the once wealthy and acclaimed Edmund Spenser died "for want of bread"; a new biography tries to disentangle myth from fact, and to make the case for the great poet's relevance today
Read MoreSome of Anthony Burgess' most accomplished inventions roam into the past, to Shakespeare and Marlowe's England and Jesus' Judea. How well has his historical fiction stood up across the years?
Read MoreAs Americans go to the polls this month to elect a president, some recent biographies examine the lives of five very different men who once held the office.
Read MoreTheir brains - their digits - their eyes - their locomotion - their families - their staggeringly long reign over the planet Earth: it's all here, and much, much more. The greatest dinosaur reference work just got even better.
Read MoreHe started an artist on the path to glory, sold a million toys, and inspired a cult classic movie: He's Flash Gordon, and his earliest Sunday adventures are getting a deluxe reprint series.
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For most of your long life, you looked to this uneasy translation with a mixture of dread and prurience, and now it’s upon you (“townsman of a stiller town,” from a poem you professed to hate and yet memorized, as was your way in all things), and the rest of us – your literary heirs, executors, apostates, and survivors – can say, with a kind of painful bewilderment, “The 20th Century is over.”
You were beautiful, and then you were elegant, and then you were a magnificent ruin. You talked better than most of the talkers, wrote better than most of the writers, and when it counted, you were brave. In all its virtues and vices you epitomized the country you abandoned. The ‘book-chat world’ you held in such merciless contempt will now bury you in the encomiums that so pre-emptively appalled you (“They’ll say such dreadful soupy things about one – the open bar will beckon”), but time, perhaps, will be kind. And in the meantime, we’ll do the thing you wanted most: we’ll remember you – the writer, the raconteur, the polemicist … the last paladin of Camelot.
History's most famous divorce shook the world and changed history, but it took much more than a king snapping his fingers to make it happen - obscure men on fast horses risked their livelihoods and their lives to line up the paperwork.
Read MoreQueen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was a cherished and beloved fixture of the British royal family for almost a century (and would certainly have stolen the show at her daughter's Diamond Jubilee, had she lived to see it) - but a new book claims the Queen Mum was just an ordinary human being - and not always a very nice one
Read MoreShe's occupied the throne of Great Britain and the Commonwealth for 60 years, and in June Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Diamond Jubilee. Three new biographies try to understand the woman wearing the crown.
Read MoreHe survived years of dangerous exile, won his crown on the battlefield, and founded one of the most famous dynasties in human history - and yet we still haven't embraced Henry VII. A spirited biography seeks to change that.
Read MoreOne hundred years ago this month, the luxury liner Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, with the loss of over 1500 lives. The centenary has released a flood of books, including some gems not to be missed.
Read MoreElizabeth Hardwick joined the literary world of mid-20th century Manhattan with every intention of making her mark upon it - which she did, in review after inimitable review, taking American book-discourse to levels and places it had never reached before
Read MoreHe fought a world war with France, survived the Black Death, and gave England a real Parliament. Froissart and Chaucer loved him, Shakespeare (almost) wrote about him, and the Victorians disparaged him. He was Edward III, and he has a king-sized new biography from Yale University Press.
Read MoreMaligned as nothing but handsome breeding stock, this German import did more to redefine the role of the monarchy than any subsequent royal, consort or king.
Read MoreHe lost his famous mother when he was a boy, became a teen idol, had a storybook wedding, and he's second in line to be King of England. The monarchy Prince William inherits will be like nothing his predecessors have experienced - if it exists at all. "A Year with the Windsors" concludes.
Read MoreHe's been waiting for the throne longer than any Prince of Wales before him, and he's changed the nature of the monarchy while he's been waiting. But will we ever see King Charles III? 'A Year with the Windsors' takes a look at the heir.
Read MoreCourtier and cleric, adventurer and ascetic, man of faith and man of the world — John Donne was many things in his life, and a sprawling new Companion does its best to assess them all.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.