Books

Effective affinities

Moral philosophy, the individual and the future

Liberalism’s lion

Christopher Hitchens remains unforgettable

All action, no abstraction

On the hunks and lunks who dominated two decades of Hollywood

The lovelorn lady who broke the rules

A romantic forced by peculiar privilege into perpetual masquerade

Searching for a radical alternative

Two new titles join a burgeoning chorus of populist lament

A massacre of straw men

Kehinde Andrews is not a serious reviewer

What book blurbs really mean

Publishing professionals often speak in code, but our man on the inside is a cryptographer

Missing a slam dunk

Cleopatra is not a terrible movie, but this failed Hollywood history is

A stirring tale of delicious complexity

From the Mongols’ conquest of Persia to their defeat by the Mamluks

Unstable foundations

The unsound architecture of the Edwardian Baroque