Novelist Julian Barnes gets it right in his new book of essays: the best way to see a painting is to look, and keep looking.

If educated Arab women respond to repression by adopting a transgressive liberationist agenda, it won’t serve any of us well.

Thanks to an exhibition hosted by the National Gallery of Art, museumgoers are getting an uncensored, rich, and occasionally rough-around-the-edges view of a key Impressionist in his formative stages.

Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger: The Idealist is a brilliant, magisterial work, as clever, perceptive, and occasionally contrarian as its complicated subject.

Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education is right: Liberal education gives one a competitive edge in the marketplace. But is that the best reason we should treasure it?

A collection of Joseph Roth’s nonfiction in translation shows the melancholy wanderer at his captivating best.

Ian Bremmer argues that America should tender its resignation as the world’s superpower. But becoming Clark Kent, permanently, is not sound strategy.

Richard Beck explains 1980s-era child abuse hysteria as part of a traditionalist backlash, but he sidesteps the role of progressive politics in moral panics, past and present.

Alfred Chandler, Jr. revolutionized the history of business in general, and particularly the business of America’s Second Industrial Revolution.

War literature clambers over just a few tried and true thematic paths that date all the way back to Homer. But we still like it.