The New Republic

The Richard Burton DiariesEdited by Chris Williams (Yale University Press, 693 pp., $35)   JUNE 14, 1969, and for a dawn moment he was calm, remembering Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas: “I love my wife. I love her dearly. Honest. Talk about the beauty, silent, bare.... Sitting on the Thames with the river imitating a blue-grey ghost. My God the very houses seem asleep. And all that mighty heart is lying still.” READ MORE >>

I commented long ago in The Spine about the courtship between fundamentalist Christianity and Israel. READ MORE >>

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa By Jason K. Stearns (PublicAffairs, 380 pp., $28.99) READ MORE >>

Brigham Young: American Moses By Leonard J. Arrington (Knopf, 522 pp., $24.95) READ MORE >>

When I took a college course in Wagner, our professor told us on the first day that the final exam would consist of one question: Who was Wagner? On exam day he wrote that question on the blackboard, then left the room. READ MORE >>

Middleman Percy READ MORE >>