United Kingdom
The Border Crossers
From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 By John Connelly (Harvard University Press, 376 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
From time to time these days, one meets young people—film students even—who can’t quite place Gary Cooper. Come May 13, he will have been dead for 51 years; and on May 7—the day I’m writing—he was born in 1901, up in Montana. Which seems appropriate for one of our great cowboys or Westerners, except that after being raised first on a cattle ranch he spent seven crucial years of his childhood in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, in England. READ MORE >>
The Force of a Woman
The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi By Peter Popham (The Experiment, 448 pp., $27.50) READ MORE >>
Europe’s Other Crisis
Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of the Second Generation By Robert S. Leiken (Oxford University Press, 354 pp., $27.95) After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent By Walter Laqueur (Thomas Dunne Books, 322 pp., $26.99) READ MORE >>
The Galling Misuse Of The German Example
I don’t usually wade into global economic policy here on the Stump, but as Mitt Romney reminded us in his speech last night, the 2012 presidential race is “still about the economy—and we’re not stupid.” So after coming across a particular pet peeve of mine just now, I’m going to wade on in. READ MORE >>
What does “deep blue” mean in this film, or in the Terence Rattigan play that has prompted a movie from Terrence Davies sixty years later? Deep blue is no small matter; it’s not just Miles Davis doing “Kind of Blue,” William Gass’s book On Being Blue, a nickname for IBM, or Lucian Freud’s painting, “Man in a Blue Scarf.” Four out of ten people name blue as their favorite color. So I have always wanted more from The Deep Blue Sea than it ever delivers. READ MORE >>
That is So! That is So!
The Sense of an Ending By Julian Barnes (Knopf, 163 pp., $23.95) READ MORE >>
