History

Comedy can be a powerful medium for expressing important ideas, and Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is a standout example.

More than any of his contemporaries, Sargent expressed the glamour that emerging capitalism made possible. Yet that is just what made him incomprehensible or unacceptable to later artists and critics.

Across Britain, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s innovations stand as triumphant monuments to his genius—and likely will for centuries to come.

If you appreciate man at his best, read this book. You’ll not only enjoy heroes more deeply, you’ll be better equipped to emulate them, too.

By burning and pillaging the property of their fellow citizens, rioters spit on the progress their forbears achieved under far worse circumstances.

At the height of the Nazi reign of terror, a group of idealistic young Germans rose to challenge Hitler’s regime. In reference to the moral purity of their cause, they dubbed themselves the “White Rose.”

Although the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling is a partial victory for freedom, it falls short of making a principled stand for individual rights.

The first in a two-part series on the country’s fundamental ideas, America’s Revolutionary Mind is not a narrative of events but a systematic re-creation of the philosophy that led colonists to, in the words of Thomas Paine, “begin the world over again.”

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a firecracker of a woman with a studied yet eclectic taste in art and the means to acquire lots of it. As one friend put it, she lived “at a rate and intensity, with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin and shadowy.”

In Heroes, Legends, Champions, Andrew Bernstein has created a fascinating hybrid of useful philosophy and inspirational vignettes about outstanding men and women. The result is a book that can help people rise to heroic heights in their own lives.