The troubled relationship between Mussolini and his son-in-law
Count Galeazzo Ciano’s career is uniquely revealing as an insight into the perils of joining the family business
Books and Arts
Sunday
Men at War examines homosexuality among World War Two soldiers
Luke Turner’s essential thesis is that the war opened up a brief time of sexual liberation for men
The history of a Britney Spears masterpiece
Blackout laid the foundation for the EDM revolution, Lady Gaga’s self-referential debut album and the rest of the past fifteen years of pop
Taking in Good Night, Oscar and New York, New York
Good Night, Oscar takes us back to a time when, for better or worse, both foibles and felonies were targets for humor
What the Old Masters can teach us about contemporary life
In many of their most enduring images, the Old Masters did not shy away from asking ‘Why?’ in the face of suffering and trauma
The surreal life of Leonora Carrington
The artist and writer’s life is the story of the twentieth century in microcosm
Heidi Swanson, the whole food revolutionary
In an effort to lighten up my diet for the summer, I explored the 101 Cookbooks catalogue
Sunday
The dauntless spirit of Richard Halliburton
The writer’s forgotten imagination and commitment to exploration merit revival
The king and queen who saved the British monarchy
A well-researched new biography of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth
How refugees saved a town in upstate New York
But will the restoration of Utica survive?
Inside the world of multilevel marketing
Pyramid schemes work because we all have points of vulnerability
Tom Hanks should stick to acting
The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is as clumsy as its plodding title
Where will the vogue for censoring our best-loved authors lead?
It seems that the ‘revised’ titles are likely to become the norm
Bringing back Stephen Sondheim and enduring a new Andrew Lloyd Webber
Bad Cinderella is a pumpkin, while Parade becomes an exercise in emotional torture porn
How Madonna turned pop culture Catholic
On the fortieth anniversary of her debut album, Madonna remains a good Catholic girl at heart
What makes Berthe Morisot’s nudes so unique?
She provides a new lens to look at Impressionism
What museums can learn from contemporary technology
The National Gallery of Art has quietly but steadily undergone a major culture shift
Thursday
Who was the real Martin Luther King, Jr.?
King: A Life is the first comprehensive biography of the black civil rights hero to appear in more than thirty years
What makes a novel funny?
In search of the great American comic novel
Curtis Sittenfeld is the great American observer
In Romantic Comedy , we get her insight into a new phenomenon — celebrity of the modern age