I honestly believe that 1/2 the people who read about the Mitfords are motivated to do so by a kind of fierce jealousy which drives them where they do not want to go. —Diana Mitford to Deborah Mitford, May 13, 1985 Several years ago, Charlotte Mosley found herself at lunch with her mother-in-law, Diana Mosley (née Mitford). Grumbling about the latest request by an outsider to illuminate yet another aspect of Mitford life, Diana looked at her youngest son, Max, and her daughter-in-law and said: “Why don’t one of you do something for a change?” Perhaps forgetting that Jonathan

In December 1996, the corrupt, discredited Guatemalan military and a decimated guerrilla army signed a peace accord, under United Nations supervision, ending thirty-six years of civil war. Less than two years later, the Guatemalan Archdiocese Office of Human Rights (known by the Spanish acronym odha) published a fourteen-hundred-page study of wartime atrocities, based on six thousand interviews conducted around the country with traumatized survivors and perpetrators of la violencia. This final report from the church’s Recovery of Historical Memory (remhi) investigations counted 150,000 dead and 50,000 dis­appeared and held the military primarily responsible. Its recommendations were no less powerful for

Tucked in among the many gems—culinary, historical, literary, religious, and otherwise—stashed throughout Gillian Riley’s new Oxford Companion to Italian Food is “The Pope’s Kitchen,” a luscious, whimsical sonnet by the nineteenth-century Roman poet Gioachino Giuseppe Belli, which I cannot bear to include here in anything but its entirety:

What makes one copy of an old book more valuable than another? Should pristine copies, fresh and white, bring the highest prices? Or messy ones that show the complex and multiple signs of use? Over the last two centuries, most dealers, collectors, and librarians have preferred the former. Catalogue descriptions emphasized the handsome, unscarred bindings and crisp, clean paper that showed no one had ever read the books in question––much less smeared them with perspiration, messed up their neat rows of printed text by underlining striking sentences, or filled clear margins with scrawled comments. When the marks of use were

If form hadn’t been a conspicuous problem for philosophers just then and there, the idea of a history of postwar French philosophy as seen on television would seem like a joke. But in the thirty years after the radio broadcast of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 essay “Republic of Silence,” philosophers in France were peculiarly concerned with their changing media. Declaring the book inert—“written by a dead man about dead things,” Sartre wrote in 1947, “it no longer has any place on this earth”—he advised contemporary writers to “learn to speak in images” and to work for newspapers, radio, and film.

Gram Parsons was just twenty-six years old when he died. In his lifetime, he released exactly one album under his own name, and as a member of various bands—none for long—he contributed to only a handful of recordings; the highest any of those albums reached on the charts was a sorry no. 77. Yet more than three decades after his death from a heroin overdose in Joshua Tree, California, there are as many biographies of Parsons as there are albums that include his voice. The latest addition is David Meyer’s Twenty Thousand Roads, the most thorough exploration yet of the

If you found yourself on the corner of Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan sometime in the ’60s, you would have come upon a towering figure clad like a Viking (flowing robe, leather cowl adorned with horns, spear) whose closed eyes and biblical beard bespoke a prophetic, otherworldly presence. With his alms cup and strange musical instruments at hand, Moondog held forth at this location for many of the years he busked on the sidewalks of New York City. Born Louis Hardin, the future street musician grew up in various towns around the West and Midwest. As Robert Scotto

A legendary lost comic from the dawn of the art form’s commercial resurgence in the early ’90s, Frank Santoro’s Storeyville recalls the oversize pages of the Sunday papers from the early twentieth century, the era in which its story of railroad-hopping lost men is set. On first glance, the book’s imposing size and low page count recall precious documents pressed between boards for preservation’s sake. That may be because the original was self-published in 1995 by Santoro and then-collaborator Katie Glicksberg on delicate, tabloid-size newsprint and mostly given away for free. The cover to that edition has been reproduced inside

“ALL MY LIFE,” D. H. LAWRENCE ONCE said, “I have from time to time gone back to paint because it gave me a form of delight that words can never give.” The possibility that Lawrence’s urge to make art might be widely shared among his fellow wordsmiths receives ample affirmation in Donald Friedman’s The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers (Minneapolis: Mid-List Press, $40), as well as in a corresponding show recently held at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City. Among the nearly two hundred writers on display are likely suspects (Henri Michaux, Beatrix Potter, Edward