Eunice Lipton was a fledging art historian when she first became intrigued by Victorine Meurent, the nineteenth-century model who appeared in Edouard Manet's most famous paintings, only to vanish from history in a haze of degrading hearsay. But had...

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was a major historical figure during the waning of the Middle Ages. Statesman, diplomat, courtier, and financier, he was, at the same time, a scholar of encyclopedic learning, a philosopher, an exegete, a prolific...

The manuscript of Alma Mahler's Diaries, a pile of old exercise books, lay unread and seemingly illegible in the library of an American university. In search of the truth about Alma and Alexander Zemlinsky, Antony Beaumont read them—and found what he...

Arguably the most important American composer of the century, Elliott Carter often has been more highly regarded in Europe than in his native land. Interest in his work has grown rapidly in recent years, however, and the celebration of his ninetieth...

"A penetrating biography. . . . Ludington offers a psychological portrait of an intense, contradictory, scornful, but gentle man who transcended his nineteenth-century roots in Lewiston, Maine, to view Europe as his home and to make a distinctive...

The third volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt.

"Changing Enemies is one of the last accounts we shall have by a witness to some of the high-level decision making during the war and its immediate aftermath. . . . Lord Annan's book valuably points to the contribution to German democracy that was...

Catherine Evtuhov resurrects the brilliant and contradictory currents of turn-of-the-century Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg through an intellectual biography of Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), one of the central figures of the Silver Age. The son of a...

"The best thing ever done on how Tolstoy wrote War and Peace. Feuer shows us an incredible complexity in terms of the creative process. You see the seams and joints in the novel."—Gary Saul Morson, Northwestern University "In 1963, Kathryn B. Feuer...