Hermione Lee

Epic Ambitions

A new life of Gertrude Stein treats her as a philosopher of language to trust, not explain—and gathers force from archival discoveries and intriguing plots of her reception and reputation.

A Wider Devotion

George Eliot’s latest biographer sees her novels as making felt the human need for commitment, not just to intimate others but to a task in life and to the larger world.

The Soft-Power Brokers

A new history focusing on the English Rothschilds tells how the women were centrally involved in business, politics, social welfare, and culture—all while caught between the advantages of wealth and the burdens of anti-Semitism and sexism.

Poet of the Dispossessed

Joseph Roth was unwavering in his passion for the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, which inspired his greatest novel, his hatred of nationalism, and his prophetic and courageous loathing for the Nazis. About everything else, as a new biography shows, he had violently mixed feelings.

Regarding the Solace of Others

Michael Ignatieff’s moving book explores how consolation has been configured in different eras and suggests what we might learn from individual examples of “the human experience.”

The Wanderer

Jan Morris wrote that her constant travels were ‘an outer expression of my inner journey,’ ‘fired by patriotism, inhibited by upbringing, inexhaustibly in love.’

An Undisappearing Act

Diane Johnson’s restitutionary biography brings George Meredith’s first wife out of his shadow.

Sympathy for the Devil

There is a profound issue of freedom at the core of Marilynne Robinson’s novels. Can we change our lives?

Not Even Past

The Dark Side

The Mists of Time

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

The Triumph of Jenny Diski

A Poet Unlike Any Other

Often described as dotty, batty, silly, or odd, Stevie Smith can be celebrated as a major English poet of the 20th century

The Threat to the Editorial Institute

Alice Munro’s Magic

Her characters often have to decide what “home” means, and what to do with it when you have left it

The Charms of John Updike

He gave “the mundane its beautiful due”

Willa Cather: A Hidden Voice

On ‘The Selected Letters’

Finding a Very Secret Self

The Terrors of the Woman President

Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Mudwoman’