Imbibe Shakespeare gin! Made with herbs from his garden!!!😂

If there’s any lesson to be taken from ⁦Fitzcarraldo Editions⁩ phenomenal success, it’s that if you publish the intelligent, exciting & innovative books you believe in, the readers will come. newyorker.com/magazine/2024/…

Four years and an $80.5m renovation later, the Folger library has reopened its doors. It wants to make the case that Shakespeare belongs to everyone, even if he seems pale, male and stale econ.st/4bs1QkT 👇

One of the saddest stories I’ve ever worked on. Gerald Fremlin sexually abused Andrea Skinner when she was a child. When her mother found out, she chose him over her daughter. Her mother was Alice Munro. thestar.com/opinion/contri…

I'm thinking about those instances in Munro's fiction where grown men abuse children – Mr. Chamberlain with Del, Rose's train seat mate in "Wild Swans," Ladner in "Vandals," the latter brought up in the piece. There must be more. In a way this story reframes all of that now.

Seems like a good moment to post my Guardian Books review of JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, written in 2016 when a lot of liberals were enjoying being scolded by Vance about the 'white working class'. I didn't buy it then... theguardian.com/books/2016/dec…

Filled with sex, intrigue, blood and betrayal, King Henry VIII’s reign is a ready-made soap opera. New tellings are resurrecting his queens for modern audiences econ.st/463JDcq 👇

I wrote about Katherine Parr & tales of the wives for The Economist

I'm very sorry to hear about the death of Alexander Waugh, a kind, generous, and brilliant man who possessed, as this obit notes, the "full measure of the family's eccentric and provocative wit." telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/202…

Months ago, a reader told me that this page—a scene with Alexander Waugh— was her favorite in the whole book. I’m inclined to agree.

“You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.” This week, to celebrate James Baldwin’s life and legacy on the occasion of his one hundredth birthday, we’ve unlocked his Art of Fiction interview from our archive. buff.ly/3dC4FD5

I wrote about Byron's legacy in Italy & Greece

Have you read “Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies” by the one and only Elizabeth Winkler? You might have read some of her essays already in The Wall Street Journal, economist ❚ ❚, The New Yorker etc. I was introduced to the book by Lucy Carson and loved every minute of it. Honestly cannot give it a

Alice Munro refused to confront her partner’s sexual abuse of her daughter in her life, but she grappled with it in her short stories. “She had to trade reality for fiction, her daughter for art,” Rachel Aviv writes. nyer.cm/7BW1lG6

From the French revolution to the Arab spring, readers have turned to “Paradise Lost” in times of political struggle. Why? econ.st/41ZLOOk 👇

Why do rebels and revolutionaries love “Paradise Lost”? Starting the new year with Milton & Satan - my review of Orlando Reade's WHAT IN ME IS DARK, a study of the poem's strange afterlife

What happens to the unconscious under authoritarian rule? A collection of dreams from Nazi Germany has been translated into English in the hope that it "could help inspire today's readers to train their own attention on dreams" Princeton University Press economist.com/culture/2025/0…