By Robin Olson

The doctor who delivered Sybilla Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck on March 16, 1911, in Berlin had a keen eye. “She looks so clever,” he said. Indeed. She grew up to be Sybille Bedford, successful novelist, travel writer, judicial commentator, biographer, and memoirist. Her true genius, however, may have been for friendship. Selina Hastings’s biography, rich with excerpts from diaries and letters, does full justice to Sybille the writer, but she intrigues the reader most with her account of Sybille’s relationships. As a fisher of friends, Sybille cast a net around the globe and the century.

Sybille’s parents were a handsome, unhappy pair: her father, an impoverished minor German aristocrat known as “le Beau Max”; her mother, Lisa, a spoiled beauty, Jewish by birth, with a formidable intellect and an intense desire to write. READ ON

Richard Bradford’s new biography of Patricia Highsmith evokes a flawed genius who bridged crime writing and high literature

By John Carey

Patricia Highsmith did not have an ideal start in life. Her parents were young artists adrift in New York and they reckoned a child would be an encumbrance. So her mother drank turpentine to procure an abortion. But Highsmith was always obstinately intent on thwarting other people’s plans, and she duly entered the world on January 19, 1921.

Understandably she grew to hate the woman who had tried to terminate her existence, and her mother made things worse by asking her, as a teenager: “Are you a les? You are beginning to make noises like one.”

As the target of Patricia’s hatred, though, her mother was by no means READ ON

Magazine covers spanning 1945 to today celebrate the community that gave us Jackie Robinson, M.L.K., Aretha Franklin, and Oprah

By Julia Vitale

“Ebony was Black America’s social media long before the birth of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram,” writes Lavaille Lavette in the introduction to a collection of the magazine’s covers. “Ebony served as our connector.” Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, who himself graced the cover following his death, in 2005, Ebony cast itself as a Life magazine from the Black perspective. Perusing these vibrant covers, however, you quickly realize that they don’t just celebrate the Black community’s heroes—from Jackie Robinson to Martin Luther King Jr., to Aretha Franklin—and its pivotal moments, such as the unveiling of the 18-foot chancel READ ON

By Dominic Sandbrook

Picture the scene. You’re staying at a dilapidated baroque castle in the Austrian countryside, with thick stone walls and an overgrown moat. The septuagenarian owner, Horst, a tall, friendly man with an “embracingly guttural, warm, hesitant, gentle voice”, makes you feel thoroughly at home. Over tea he tells you about his family history: his parents’ youthful love affair; his memories of his wartime childhood; the sad loss of his father when he was still a boy.

Then, almost idly, you pick out a book from the shelves, “black cover, no title, a gilded eagle astride a swastika”. Inside is a heartfelt inscription, from Horst’s mother to his father in 1931: “Through struggle and love to the finish.” The book’s title is READ ON

By Melanie Reid

Once upon a time dogs entertained us in the circus or in Snoopy comic strips. These days they perform online to staggering audiences. YouTube’s Ultimate Dog Tease has 200 million views and Olive and Mabel, a recent phenomenon, has five million and rising.

At least these are normal dogs. Much, much freakier is @jiffpom, a pomeranian photographed wearing human baby clothes (10.4 million Instagram followers, 12 million likes on Facebook), or poor, quease-inducing @tunameltsmyheart, a deformed chihuahua/dachshund cross (2.1 million Instagram followers). Dog lovers can get interactive with WeRateDogs (8.9 million on Twitter), which makes so much money on merchandising that its teenage inventor quit university and hired his father, a lawyer. “Nobody’s going to stop liking dogs any time soon,” Matt Nelson told READ ON

By Richard Morrison

I don’t wish to tempt malign fate but I must point out that this winter could actually be a lot worse. Imagine, on top of the pandemic, the sort of January in which food lorries can’t get through snowdrifts reaching 23ft in places, where millions of homes have lost their water supply because of pipes frozen in temperatures that sometimes plunge to negative four degrees, and where striking power workers have deprived homes, workplaces, schools and hospitals of heat and light for several hours each day.

That is the winter evoked in Frostquake, Juliet Nicolson’s entertaining panorama of life in READ ON

An activist reveals the shocking truth behind big-game hunting, and the moneyed interests (with the U.S. government in their pocket) that are making sure things don’t change

By Eduardo Gonçalves

When Cecil the Lion was shot, in 2015, the story went viral. People were shocked that this colonial “sport” was still going on. However, as I wrote in my recent book Killing Game, published on the fifth anniversary of Cecil’s killing, thousands more lions have been shot by trophy hunters since his tragic death.

I also revealed how trophy hunters kill tens of thousands of other endangered animals every year—including rhinos, cheetahs, and polar bears.

My latest book, Trophy Leaks, seeks to answer the glaring question of why. We face a conservation crisis of cataclysmal proportions. Why is it still legal to kill some of the most endangered animals on earth? READ ON

A book of photographs offers new ways of looking at architecture, its influence, and its surroundings

By Julia Vitale

If Ayn Rand did one thing right, it was conjuring—without a single illustration—a style of architecture totally in sync with its landscape. In 1964, Bernard Rudofsky echoed this approach in his influential exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Architecture Without Architects,” which encouraged design that broke free of classical forms and instead adapted to its setting, both spatially and in terms of the place’s vernacular. Nearly a half-century later, this transition is still very much in progress.

Beatrice Galilee’s Radical Architecture of the Future adds to the conversation with an exploration of 79 projects that offer alternative approaches READ ON

By Joanne Kaufman

For years, colleagues and friends tried coaxing and chivying Mike Nichols into writing his autobiography and telling just how the whole shebang unfolded: the wunderkind comedy partnership with Elaine May that set things spinning in the late 1950s and led to Nichols’s prodigious career as a theater director, which led—seamlessly—to his equally notable career as a filmmaker. Movie project No. 1: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Sophomore effort: The Graduate.

Nichols treated the book idea as a great gag. Another Fucking Beautiful Day was the title he offered for an account of his early days in Hollywood. He later suggested READ ON

A German publisher is finally relinquishing rights to a best-selling cookbook, stolen from a Jewish family and republished under an Aryanized name

By Sara Tor

The rights to a cookbook that once stood on bookshelves in half the households of Vienna have been returned to its owners, more than 80 years after it was stolen by the Nazis.

Written in 1935 by Alice Urbach, a Jewish resident of Vienna, the best-selling So Kocht man in Wien! (How to Cook in Vienna!), containing 500 pages of recipes including boiled beef, Wiener schnitzel, apricot dumplings and pastries, was swiped following the Nazis’ 1938 annexation of Austria. As Urbach fled to Britain, her publishers, Ernst Reinhardt of Munich, bowed to the orders of the Nazis, who claimed the cookbook and two others she had written for themselves by “Aryanizing” and republishing it under the name of Rudolf Rösch, whose existence has never been proven. READ ON

By Lisa Henricksson

Until her murder, Lady Araba was the It Girl of Ghana. A strikingly elegant fashion designer with her own successful line of clothing, a close-knit family, and an adoring boyfriend, she seemed to have it all, so naturally the list of people who may have wanted her dead is lengthy.

Nearly a year after she was killed at her home in a ritzy gated community outside Accra, supposedly by her now imprisoned chauffeur, a concerned aunt takes matters into her own hands, engaging the Sowah Private Investigators Agency to see if they can succeed where, she feels, the police have failed. READ ON

By Tobias Grey

In the field of Nazi art plunderers, Bruno Lohse was a literal giant. At six-feet-four-inches tall, the former SS physical instructor and semi-professional handball player cut an intimidating figure in wartime Paris. Jonathan Petropoulos observes that as specially appointed “art adviser” to infamous Nazi leader Hermann Göring, Lohse was permitted to wear civilian clothes, drive a private car wherever he pleased, and buy whatever he wished.

The self-proclaimed “king of Paris” was no idiot, either. He possessed a Ph.D. in art history (he was known as Dr. Lohse) and impressed Göring with his knowledge of the Dutch Old Masters READ ON

Fans remember him as the boisterous R&B singer. But Little Richard had a complicated personal life—and leaves a profound legacy

By Mark Ribowsky

On May 9, 2020, the day Little Richard died, at age 87, I had all but completed my book The Big Life of Little Richard. It was a volume originally intended as a picture-heavy tribute to the man whose big life defined all that rock was, could be, and will always be. But even before he died, the book wanted more. For me, a hopelessly addicted biographer, an elemental truth became evident: as much as I thought I knew about Little Richard, I didn’t know him at all.

Richard Wayne Penniman was a native son of the Jim Crow READ ON

What to read this week, including new books from Joan Didion and George Saunders, and a 1500s polar adventure gone wrong

Polar-adventure stories are even better than mountaineering tales, since not only does the reader have the vicarious thrills of blinding snow, temperatures in the minus two figures, and terrible fatigue but there are ferocious polar bears and almost always ships. The saga of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen trying to beat each other to the South Pole still captivates, and the Shackleton expedition lives on primarily due to the stark photographs taken during that voyage. In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer brilliantly retells the largely forgotten quest by Dutch explorer William Barents to find a passage READ ON

Kiley Reid worked as a babysitter in New York before fictionalizing her experience for the page. The resulting novel explores racism and liberal hypocrisy

By Rosie Kinchen

The best books should hold up a mirror to society, even when the reflection isn’t one you want to see — or at least that’s what I told myself when I put down Such a Fun Age, the debut novel from the up-and-coming American author Kiley Reid. One of the runaway literary successes of last year, the book tells the story of a young Black babysitter and the white woman who pays her to care for her toddler.

It’s a brilliantly observed skewering of liberal hypocrisy that has topped bestseller lists, become a book-club favorite (Reese Witherspoon chose it for hers), been longlisted for the Booker prize, and is now being adapted for the screen. READ ON

One hundred years after Patricia Highsmith’s birth, the Talented Mr. Ripley author’s life and work remain as appealing as ever. What’s her secret?

By Andrew Wilson

Patricia Highsmith, the ultimate purveyor of what Graham Greene called “cruel pleasures”, was born 100 years ago this month. The dark celebrations for this most misanthropic of modern novelists are about to begin with the publication of Under a Dark Angel’s Eye, a new collection of her short stories.

And that’s not all. This month there’s a new biography of the writer by Richard Bradford. Highsmith’s eye-opening diaries and notebooks — which I drew on for Beautiful Shadow, the first biography of the author — will be published in the summer. This year we should see the READ ON

By Abhrajyoti Chakraborty

It begins, for the writer Tove Ditlevsen, with a secret: a Rilkean “song in my heart.” Her father is a factory worker; her brother, an apprentice at a car workshop. They live in a two-room apartment in Istedgade—her mother calls it a “proletarian neighborhood”—in early-20th-century Denmark. One day, Tove blurts out to her family that she wants to be a poet. “A girl can’t be a poet,” her father replies.

And so the pattern is set. Tove learns to never reveal her true self or the intensity with which she sees the world. She writes poems to an imaginary lover in a notebook that she hides inside a dresser drawer. READ ON

By Tim Bouverie

Anyone who has seen Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie (2008)—the tale of the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler—will have been struck by the contrast between the conspirators and those against whom they are conspiring. There is would-be assassin Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a paragon of medieval chivalry, played by Tom Cruise; Major General Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh), principled, courageous, and suave; General Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy), sensitive and polite; and General Ludwig Beck (Terence Stamp), courteous and dignified. Ranged against them is a pip-squeak colonel, a Cockney-accented Field Marshal Keitel, and a Dr. Goebbels who looks like the Child Catcher from READ ON

The story behind J.F.K.’s 1960 victory is inextricably tied to M.L.K., his imprisonment, and the Kennedy team that helped free him

By Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick

It all began with an unexpected proposal from a neighbor, who offered to put us in touch with his mentor, Harris Wofford. In writing Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 Election, we were straddling the line between past and present. Many of our subjects had long since died. But Wofford, then 89, provided the living link between Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy.

As became evident during our long conversations in his Washington, D.C., condo overlooking Rock Creek Park, Wofford treasured this historical tie. He welcomed us with READ ON

By Daniel Finkelstein

Ben Ferencz landed on the beaches of Normandy, broke through the Maginot and Siegfried lines, took part in the Battle of the Bulge and served in the headquarters of General Patton’s Third Army. He received five battle stars from the Pentagon and was on the scene during the liberation of Buchenwald and Mauthausen.

He was chief prosecutor of the SS death squads at Nuremberg, pulled dead bodies out of the mud with his hands, jumped out of a plane that was about to crash, made millions of dollars as a lawyer, became a famous human rights campaigner and philanthropist, READ ON

Books to read this week, from histories of China and Hitler’s warships to an investigation into U.S. involvement in Afghanistan

Books billed as “sweeping histories” tend—alas—to live up to the description: they are like giant brooms collecting events big and small and dumping them at your feet. Michael Wood’s book is the exception, full in scope but so engagingly written and so attuned to the lively details and personalities of the Middle Kingdom that the reader finishes the book both enthralled and more optimistic about the Chinese people (as opposed to their leadership) than most Western observers.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump agreed on at least one thing: get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible. Obama READ ON

By Laura Freeman

There’s a popular publishing genre that has French authors tell les rosbifs where we’re going wrong. French Children Don’t Throw Food, French Women Don’t Get Fat, French Women Don’t Get Facelifts, French Women Are Eyeing Up Your Husband Even Now … Whenever a slender Parisian intones: “Il faut souffrir pour être belle” (“one must suffer to be beautiful”), I want to say: “Faut off.”

What cultural cringe, what sense of national inadequacy makes us buy these books? The Relay bookshop next to the Eurostar terminal in the Gare du Nord was always full of them. In distant mini-break days, you could buy a copy of READ ON

By Jessica Lahey

To 21st-century humanity, space exploration feels like a forgone conclusion. We have always looked heavenward, organizing stars into constellations and constellations into elaborate mythologies to explain the natural world and our human condition. Once we slipped the surly bonds of Earth’s gravity, the race was on—to go higher, travel farther, explore ever more distant worlds.

We began with the moon, an obvious first destination that looms large over our psyches and our backyards. It illuminates our nights with its reflected light, pinning our shadows to the ground like specimens on a vast terrestrial display.

Next came Mars, lure of Bezos and Musk, tantalizing in its challenge and its proximity. Then, look! Venus slid into our orbit to pull focus toward her come-hither, brilliant glow. READ ON

The essayist’s latest is a reflection on “the emotions of money,” tracing a finance-fueled history of the U.S. from Thomas Jefferson to his own parents

By Lance Morrow

God and Mammon is a long essay, or chain of essays, published as a short book (163 pages). I meant it to be a sort of experiment in ways of using the essay, that wonderful form, to connect public lives with private lives, and to link the distant American past with the surreal career of the year 2020. My idea was not to write a formal treatise on economics or monetary history but rather to talk about what I call “the emotions of money”—the psychological and cultural reverberations of that immense American subject.

I would focus on money as the READ ON