Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is The Life and Times of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, a sturdy hardcover by J. A. R. Marriott put out by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1907, when King Edward was on the throne of England and John Marriott was a professor of history at Oxford and Lucius Cary, the second Viscount [...]
Read MoreThat annual literary freakshow, the Man Booker Prize, has resumed in earnest with the publication of the ‘long list’ of potential winners for the big prize announced in October. London bookies will now trumpet the odds of each candidate, and tepid discussions will spring up in the leafier groves of the Internet. In general, the [...]
Read MoreA crucial turning-point battle in the American Revolution is given an extensively detailed and tradition-challenging new history
Read MoreRoger Tory Peterson called them "the butterflies of the bird world" - they're wood warblers, and when it comes to identifying and understanding them, Princeton University Press has published the Bible
Read MoreThe meek and peaceful Jesus has become the standard Christian image of the Messiah. Religious scholar Reza Aslan's controversial new book shatters that image and replaces it with something very different: a violent revolutionary who came not to bring peace but a sword.
Read MoreOur book today is Lord David Cecil’s 1973 compendious charmer, The Cecils of Hatfield House, a zesty character-driven history of the many generations of the storied Cecil family which rose to prominence when canny William Cecil decided to risk his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor (a relative term with the Cecils, but still) [...]
Read More"The Cousins' War" - Philippa Gregory's ongoing novelization of the Wars of the Roses - reaches an epic turning point in her latest book, about the precarious founding of the Tudor dynasty
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.