"Gustav Mahler and Alma Maria Schindler were married in . . . 1902. The bride was twenty-one and a half years old, her groom a few months short of forty-two. Apart from their substantial age difference, it seems to have been the very disparity of...

Phelan's compelling readings cover important theoretical ground by introducing a valuable distinction between disclosure functions and narrator functions.

Édith Thomas (1909–1970), a remarkable French woman of letters, was deeply involved in the traumatic upheavals of her time: most crucially the resistance to Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime, but also the Spanish Civil War and the...

Before France became France its territories included Occitania, roughly the present-day province of Languedoc. The city of Narbonne was a center of Occitanian commerce and culture during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For most of the second half...

"Cornell is unique among American research universities and in the Ivy League. . . . It aspires to the ideals of Ezra Cornell, who founded an institution 'where any one person could find instruction in any study.' . . . Cornell has played a...

The Book of the Pharaohs is an encyclopedia made up of short essays on the pharaohs themselves, as well as on places, dynasties, personages, subjects, and themes relating to the kings and their rule.

"If only I do not die here." After falling ill during a visit to Bayreuth, Franz Liszt uttered this melancholy refrain throughout his final days, which were spent in rented rooms in a house opposite Wahnfried, the home of his daughter Cosima and his...

Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire's World provides English-language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller...

"I was not a child prodigy; indeed, I had none of the requisite qualities for making a successful career." This "shortcoming" has not prevented Alfred Brendel from becoming one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. His solo recitals and...

"Foner often let others take credit, but with his names and telephone numbers he was the man to call—and take a call from. He was a champion of civil rights and civil liberties and an early and strong opponent of the Vietnam War when that was rare...