He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter". Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today". Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts – including "Scarfac...

As official botanist on James Cook's first circumnavigation, the longest-serving president of the Royal Society, advisor to King George III, the "father of Australia", and the man who established Kew as the world's leading botanical garden, Sir Josep...

Francis Poulenc is a key figure in twentieth-century classical music, as well as an unorthodox and striking individual. Roger Nichols draws upon Poulenc's music and other primary sources to write an authoritative life of this great artist. Although...

"She fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena; and the measure of success she achieved goes far beyond the credit she has been given in the histor...

How does a parent make sense of a child's severe mental illness? How does a father meet the daily challenges of caring for his gifted but delusional son, while seeking to overcome the stigma of madness and the limits of psychiatry?  W. J. T. Mitchell...

A school teacher at the start of the war, Harry Ree renounced his former pacifism with the fall of France in 1940. He was deployed into a secret branch of the British army and parachuted into central France in April 1943. Harry showed a particular t...

Alan Hurwitz ascended the ranks of academia to become the president of not one, but two, universities – National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology and Gallaudet University. In "Let's Go In: My Journey to a Universi...

After Germany's humiliating World War II defeat, numerous German generals published memoirs claiming that their country's brilliant military leadership had been undermined by the Fuhrer's erratic decision making. The author of three highly acclaimed...

Three interconnected eighteenth-century lives offer a fresh account of the British Empire and its intrusion into Indigenous societies. This engaging history brings together the stories of Joshua Reynolds and two Indigenous men, the Cherokee Ostenaco...

A family built, a family lost. "Truth Has a Different Shape" is a story of the power of compassion, of love and loss, revelations and relationship, and the evolution of self. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Kari O'Driscoll was taught that strength...