Theodore Roosevelt, the columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, was the only president in American history “who could truthfully be described as lovable.” He was our nation’s 26th president, there have been 18 more since then, and Lippmann’s statement still holds true...

What is it they say? That history repeats itself, or that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it? Doesn’t matter. There is plenty of support for both statements in Michael Perino’s admirable study, The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great...

When Richard Nixon declared to a gathering of editors in 1973, “I am not a crook,” he was wrong. He was a crook, and columnist Jack Anderson did more than anyone to expose his manifold crookedness. Anderson, meanwhile, was the Rodney Dangerfield of journalists. Even worse, actually...

George MacDonald Fraser plucked Harry Flashman, a cad and bully in Thomas Hughes’ Victorian novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and turned him into the cynical anti-hero of a series of 12 consistently entertaining Flashman historical novels. Similarly, Eric Rauchway has taken Tom Buchanan, equally...

People who hate newspapers, whose number appears to be legion, choose to forget that newspapers often have been the catalyst for useful, needed reform in American life. Instances of such newspaper-induced reform, while not similarly legion, have been many, but few have been as influential as the reporting...

Alan Furst has been writing novels about World War II for almost four times as long as the war lasted. Beginning with Night Soldiers in 1988, he has written 11 excellent espionage novels set during the war and the years leading up to it. Long may he prosper. There may be no more sincere praise than to say that a writer...

In the best ghost stories, often the real haunted entity is not a place or an object, but the central character—haunted, that is, by the character’s psyche. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is one of the best. The Haunting is one of two novels included in a new collection, Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories...

In the publisher’s advance catalog, the title of Simon Winder’s book is listed as Save Yourselves! The Gnome Has Gone Crazy! A Personal History of the Germans. At some point someone presumably thought better of it, for it has been published as Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans...