The story behind the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is legendary. The English writer had travelled to Switzerland in the summer of 1816 with her fiance, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. The trio was visiting Lord Byron at his villa near Lake Geneva, whe...
Executed with sympathy, tenderness and emotional nuance, the four parts of this novel come together to form a picture of people whose lives are inextricably linked by circumstance, community and a need to be loved.
Douglas Pitt is a man obsessed. Laughed at, mocked and dismissed at every turn, Pitt has spent the best part of an unremarkable academic career attempting to prove the genius of Samuel Highgate Syme (b 1794, Baltimore; soldier, geologist, inventor). After years of frustration, Pitt finally stumbl...
Once over Christmas break several years ago, when I hung out with Beatrice and Bill Russo at Walter’s place in Washington Heights. It was just good luck that I happened to be in town—because of the AHA conference. My supervisor at Oxford, who was chairing a panel, invited me to give a paper on it...
London had gone quiet, and Annabella had grown first listless, then dull, then bored altogether, and subsequently irritable—after which it needed only a run of wet days to induce in her a steady depression of spirits. Lady Melbourne, from private motives she promised later to reveal, wished for M...
Hadnot signed on with Würzburg, rejoining old teammates Chad Baker and Henrik Lenz, and moving by this step from third place in the league to first. Of course, he also moved six hours by car from his estranged wife and his three-year-old daughter. The most immediate effect on my life was that Ank...