Books & ideas

The Joys and Miseries of Marriage

Céline Surprenant — 2025-07-15T12:34:39Z

The “double life” of the great English novelist George Eliot combines the literary field with the experience of marriage. Her works form the crucible for reflections on love, social norms and freedom.

Empress Eugénie: France's First Lady

Murielle Gaude-Ferragu — 2023-02-28T08:30:00Z

Despite the black legend that surrounds her name, the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III's wife, was the embodiment of maternity and Christian virtues, even as she played a political and diplomatic role.

Sontag as Metaphor

Benjamin Balint — 2020-02-13T08:00:00Z

In this new biography of Susan Sontag, Benjamin Moser draws on hundreds of interviews and on the writer's restricted archives to offer a fascinating portrait of a woman driven to extremities both personal and intellectual.

Habermas in the public sphere

Clotilde Nouët — 2019-02-28T07:00:00Z

In this intellectual portrait of the enfant terrible of the Frankfurt School, S. Müller-Doohm presents us with an indefatigable polemicist whose various stands have marked the last fifty years. This first ever biography of Habermas also takes us through post-war German history.

Augustus: The Eternal Emperor

Sarah Rey — 2016-07-07T06:00:00Z

Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire in 27 BC, was a thoroughly ambiguous man: At once a republican and an autocrat, a conqueror and a peacemaker, he was the inventor of a tradition who governed like a sphinx. A biography has just come out that emphasizes the topicality of his reign.

Mr. Bellow's Planet

Benjamin Balint — 2016-02-01T08:00:00Z

Marking the centenary of Saul Bellow's birth, two new books show why the prose of the American writer has escaped eclipse: the first volume of a comprehensive biography by Zachary Leader and a rich collection of nonfiction edited by Benjamin Taylor. Emerging is the complex portrait of a writer prolific in ideas, who resisted thinking of himself as an intellectual.

Bonaparte: a Condottiere in Revolution

Annie Jourdan — 2015-01-15T06:30:00Z

It took the revolutionary meritocracy for the military, organizational, and administrative genius of the future emperor to emerge. In the first volume of his biography (up to 1802), Patrice Gueniffey shows that Bonaparte was at the same time a “king of a new kind”, an enlightened despot, a revolutionary, and a post-revolutionary, always driven by an iron will.

A Tale of a Chinese Lawyer

Jean-Luc Domenach — 2015-01-01T09:00:00Z

Now a well-known Chinese lawyer of the democratic dissidence in China, Zhang Sizhi was once a young nationalist, a high-ranking official in the court of Beijing and a victim of anti-rightist repression. In his memoirs, he provides a detailed and fascinating description of the profession and China in the second half of the 20^th century.

Politics and Economies of Reputation

Charles Walton — 2014-10-30T08:00:00Z

What's in an individual once under the public gaze? Building on recent academic trends, two books – one in English, one in French – explore the historical construct of the self in the context of eighteenth-century France.

The ‘Age of Nixon' Reconsidered

Robert Mason — 2014-09-15T07:00:00Z

Antoine Coppolani's masterful biography offers a carefully constructed account of Nixon's half-century at the centre of the American scene. The result is a compelling book that tells us much about the post–World War II years in the United States, as well as about Richard Nixon himself.