Summer Books

Forthcoming titles that have piqued my interest.

Welcome to Prufrock’s annual summer books post—a collection of links to the most intriguing (to my mind) forthcoming books over the summer. Instead of organizing these topically, as I have in the past, I thought I would simply list them by month—June, July, and August.

There is a bumper crop of books this June, including poems and essays by David Middleton and Edward Hirsch, Alan Jacobs’s biography of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a history of liturgy, biographies of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Johannes Gutenberg, as well as Geoff Dyer’s memoir.

Last week, I linked to an excerpt in Harper’s of Goeff Dyer’s memoir Homework (FSG, June 10). Here is the jacket copy: “The only child of a sheet-metal worker and a dinner lady who worked at the canteen of the local school, Geoff Dyer grew up in a world shaped by memories of the Depression and the Second World War. But far from being a story of hardship overcome, this loving memoir is a celebration of opportunities afforded by the postwar settlement, of which the author was an unconscious beneficiary. The crux comes at the age of eleven with the exam that decided the future of generations of British schoolkids: secondary modern or the transformative possibilities of grammar school? One of the lucky winners, Dyer goes to grammar school, where he develops a love of literature (and beer and prog rock). Mapping a path from primary school through the tribulations of teenage sport, gig-going, romantic fumblings, fights (well, getting punched in the face), and other misadventures with comic affection, Homework takes us to the threshold of university, where Dyer gets the first intimations that a short geographical journey—just forty miles—might extend to the length of a life. Recalling an eroded but strangely resilient England, Homework traces, in perfectly phrased and hilarious detail, roots that extend into the deep foundations of class society.”

I am a sucker for Smiths books, so I am including Carolyn McHugh’s This Charming Band: The Story of the Smiths (Sona, June 10), even if it is unlikely to add anything we don’t already know about Morrissey and Marr’s feuding.

David Middleton gave the First Things annual poetry reading in 2022. His collected poems, Time Will Tell, will be published by Texas Review Press on June 1: “In addition to the full poems of Middleton’s previously published works, Time Will Tell includes 50 years of selected, new, uncollected, and previously unpublished poems, written 1973-2023.”

I am not sure I trust Sam Tanenhaus’s judgement, but his forthcoming biography of William F. Buckley, Jr. (Random House, June 3), for which he was granted extensive access to private papers, has gotten positive reviews so far: “In 1951, with the publication of God and Man at Yale, a scathing attack on his alma mater, twenty-five-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., seized the public stage—and commanded it for the next half century as he led a new generation of conservative activists and ideologues to the peak of political power and cultural influence. Ten years before his death in 2008, Buckley chose prize-winning biographer Sam Tanenhaus to tell the full, uncensored story of his life and times, granting him extensive interviews and exclusive access to his most private papers. Thus began a deep investigation into the vast and often hidden universe of Bill Buckley and the modern conservative revolution. Buckley vividly captures its subject in all his facets and phases: founding editor of National Review, the twentieth century’s most influential political journal; syndicated columnist, Emmy-winning TV debater, and bestselling spy novelist; ally of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater; mentor to Ronald Reagan; game-changing candidate for mayor of New York. Tanenhaus also has uncovered the darker trail of Bill Buckley’s secret exploits, including CIA missions in Latin America, dark collusions with Watergate felon Howard Hunt, and Buckley’s struggle in his last years to hold together a movement coming apart over the AIDS epidemic, culture wars, and the invasion of Iraq—even as his own media empire was unraveling.”

Here are other books of note in June:

Alan Jacobs, Paradise Lost: A Biography (Princeton, June 3): “Composed through dictation after Milton went blind in 1652, Paradise Lost centers on an ancient biblical answer to the eternal question of how evil came into the world. It has proved impossible to disentangle the defense or critique of the poem from attitudes toward Christianity itself. Does Christian theology entail monarchy or democracy? Are relations between the sexes thwarted by pompous and tyrannical men or by vain and disobedient women? Jacobs traces how generations of readers have grappled with these and other questions, along the way revealing how Milton’s poem influenced novelists like Mary Shelley and Philip Pullman and has served as the inspiration for paintings, operas, comic books, and video games. An essential companion to Milton’s poetic masterpiece, this book shows why Paradise Lost continues to serve as a mirror reflecting our own complex attitudes about power and authority, justice and revolt, and sin and salvation.”

Eric Marshall White, Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books (Reaktion, June 2): “Johannes Gutenberg is famous as the inventor of Europe’s first typographic printing method, and his life and legacy have long fascinated a wide audience. Due to scant and vague fifteenth-century documentation, however, Gutenberg’s career has long been obscured by derivative storytelling, competing agendas, and scholarly guesswork. This new biography removes these barriers to retell his story directly, through his pioneering work on schoolbooks, pamphlets, indulgences, broadsides, and, notably, the first printed Bible. The book also describes Gutenberg’s posthumous fortunes and his eventual recognition as Man of the Millennium. This much-needed corrective to old legend and conjecture brings Gutenberg to life through the books that remain his lasting monument.”

Cosima Clara Gillhammer, Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy (Reaktion, June 20): “Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy offers a captivating journey through the history of religious rituals in Western Europe, showcasing the profound impact of Christian liturgy on art, literature, music, and architecture. Through ten evocative stories, it explores medieval rituals and their cultural influence up to the present day, providing fresh insights into the enduring legacy of the liturgy as an expression of human emotion and religious experience. Accessible to all, this guide provides translations and explanations to uncover the hidden treasures of ancient rites and their lasting significance, appealing to those seeking a deeper understanding of Western liturgical traditions.”

Edward St. Aubyn, Parallel Lines: A Novel (Knopf, June 3): “From the bestselling and award-winning author of the Patrick Melrose novels, a hilarious and moving story about a group of wildly different characters whose fates are improbably yet inextricably linked—a novel about extinction and survival, inheritance and loss, written with St. Aubyn’s trademark wit and inimitable style.”

David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future (Norton, June 3): “In 1919, in Newfoundland, four teams of aviators came from Britain to compete in ‘the Big Hop’ an audacious race to be the first to fly, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland. Celebrated on both continents, the transatlantic contest offered a surge of inspiration--and a welcome distraction--to a public reeling from the Great War and the influenza pandemic. But the seven airmen who made the attempt were quickly forgotten, their achievement overshadowed by the solo Atlantic flights of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart years later. In The Big Hop, David Rooney grants the pioneering aviators of 1919 the spotlight they deserve. From Harry Hawker, the pilot who as a young man had watched Houdini fly over his native Australia, to the engineer Ted Brown, a US citizen who joined the Royal Flying Corps, Rooney traces the lives of the unassuming men who performed extraordinary acts in the sky.”

Nathalie Cooke, Tastes and Traditions: A Journey through Menu History (Reaktion, June 2): “Menus are invaluable snapshots of the food consumed at specific moments in time and place. Tastes and Traditions: A Journey through Menu History provides glimpses into the meals enjoyed by royalty and rogues, those celebrating special occasions, or sampling new culinary sensations throughout history. It describes food prepared for the gods, meals served during sieges, and tablescapes immortalized in art. It explores how menus entertain adults, link food with play for children, reflect changing notions of health, and highlight the enduring human need to make meals meaningful. Lavishly illustrated, this book offers an engaging exploration of why menus matter and the stories they tell, appealing to food lovers and general readers, as well as professionals in the food industry.”

Mark Goble, Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion (Columbia, June 17): “Downtime explores the history and aesthetics of slow motion, from its origins in early film to its prominence today. Mark Goble argues that the effect's sudden visibility after 1968 registers experience of modernity as a period of perpetual acceleration that somehow makes even the smallest intervals of time feel endless. Ranging across literature, art, and cinema--including novels by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and W. G. Sebald as well as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust--he describes how writers and filmmakers depict the velocities and durations of contemporary life. Goble reveals the twentieth century and its aftermath as figured in slow motion: rushing past and deliriously delayed, everything going fast and slow at once.”

Edward Hirsch, My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy (Knopf, June 3): “From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age.”

Bryan Burrough, The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild (Penguin, June 3): “The ‘Wild West’ gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.”

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In July, we have a biography of a Catholic symbolist, the story of the CIA “book club,” a book on Bach’s cantatas, a survey of Revolutionary War artists, a new translation of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, and more:

Michael Wachtel, Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life (Columbia, July 8): “A poet, scholar, philosopher, religious thinker, translator, and teacher, Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949) was one of the most extraordinary figures of Russia’s tumultuous twentieth century. As a young scholar, he worked with European luminaries, studying ancient history with Theodor Mommsen and Sanskrit with Ferdinand de Saussure. Upon returning to Russia in 1905, Ivanov emerged as a major poet and theorist of Russian Symbolism. The Wednesday gatherings in his apartment attracted Alexander Blok, Nikolai Berdiaev, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Osip Mandel’shtam, and Anna Akhmatova. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he worked in the People's Commissariat for Education, devising utopian plans for Soviet theater. Even so, Lenin personally rejected his application for travel abroad in 1920. Four years later, Ivanov left the Soviet Union for Italy, where he became a Catholic and spent his last years working for Vatican institutions. This definitive biography of Ivanov tells the full story of his life and work amid the cataclysmic events of his time.”

Zara Anishanslin, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard, July 1): “Told through the lives of three remarkable artists devoted to the pursuit of liberty, an illuminating new history of the ideals that fired the American Revolution.”

Ruth Tatlow, Bach’s Church Cantatas (Oxford, July 10): “What is a cantata? How and why did Bach compose his cantatas? What did cantatas mean to Bach and what do they mean today? In Bach’s Church Cantatas Ruth Tatlow addresses these questions through discussion of five of Bach's most beloved works enriched by newly researched insights that will intrigue both first-time and experienced listeners.”

Giuseppe Pezzini, Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (Cambridge, July 3): “Taking his readers into the depths of a majestic and expansive literary world, one to which he brings fresh illumination as if to the darkness of Khazad-dûm, Giuseppe Pezzini combines rigorous scholarship with an engaging style to reveal the full scale of J. R. R. Tolkien’s vision of the ‘mystery of literary creation’. Through fragments garnered from across a scattered body of writing, and acute readings of primary texts (some well-known, others less familiar or recently published), the author divulges the unparalleled complexity of Tolkien’s work while demonstrating its rich exploration of literature’s very nature and purpose. Eschewing any overemphasis on context or comparisons, Pezzini offers rather a uniquely sustained, focused engagement with Tolkien and his ‘theory’ on their own terms. He helps us discover - or rediscover - a fascination for Tolkien’s literary accomplishment while correcting long-standing biases against its nature and merits that have persisted fifty years after his death.”

Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature (Random House, July 1): “For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA book program,’ which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture. From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s ‘book club’ secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers’ luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where the texts would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden’s books that dissidents began to reproduce these works in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed. Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom—people like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission.”

James Dodson, The Road That Made America: A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road (Simon & Schuster, July 1): “In the bestselling tradition of Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail and Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, The Road That Made America is a lively, epic account of one of the greatest untold stories in our nation’s history—the eight-hundred-mile long Great Wagon Road that 18th-century American settlers forged from Philadelphia to Georgia that expanded the country dramatically in the decades before we ventured west.”

Joanne Paul, Thomas More: A Life (Pegasus, July 1): “Based on new archival discoveries and drawing on more than a decade of research into More’s life and work, this is a richly told story of faith and politics that illuminates a man who, more than four hundred years after his execution, remains one of the most brilliant minds of the Renaissance.”

Pamela Smith Hill, Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books (Nebraska, July 1): “Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the well-known Little House series, wrote stories from her childhood because they were ‘too good to be altogether lost.’ And those stories seemed far from being lost during the remainder of her lifetime and through most of the twentieth century. They were translated into dozens of languages; generations of children read them at school; and dedicated readers made pilgrimages to the settings of the Little House books. With the release of NBC’s Little House on the Prairie series in 1974, Wilder was well on her way to becoming an international literary superstar. Simultaneously, however, the novels themselves began to slip from view, replaced by an onslaught of assumptions and questions about Wilder’s values and politics and even about the books’ authenticity. From the 1980s, a slow but steady critical crescendo began to erode Wilder’s literary reputation. In Too Good to Be Altogether Lost, Wilder expert Pamela Smith Hill dives back into the Little House books, closely examining Wilder’s text, her characters, and their stories. Hill reveals that these gritty, emotionally complex novels depict a realistic coming of age for a girl in the American West.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love: A New Translation, translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse (Liveright, July 15): “A founding figure of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard is perhaps best known for his writing on anxiety and despair, particularly in such works as Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness unto Death. Yet love, too, is a common theme in Kierkegaard's oeuvre, underlying his various collections of edifying discourses, as well as Either/Or, Stages on Life's Way, Christian Discourses, and especially Works of Love. First published in 1847, Works of Love is the most important explicitly religious work Kierkegaard published under his own name. Intended to awaken rather than convince--replicating, in Socratic fashion, the stinging, impatient character of a ‘gadfly’--the book consists of two sets of ‘deliberations’ on love, the first set addressing love as a duty, and the second examining the applications of love. Throughout, Kierkegaard contrasts romantic love and love of one’s friends with the selfless Christian love, or agape, of the New Testament, ultimately contending that the only way to purge self-interest from love is to love one’s neighbor as oneself, and oneself as one’s neighbor, who is ‘indeed unconditionally every person.’”

Michael M. Grynbaum, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America (Simon & Schuster, July 15): “The colorful story of Condé Nast at its zenith and the profound way it influenced how Americans aspired to look, eat, decorate, date, marry, and even think, has never been examined deeply. Empire of the Elite is the first book-length history of an empire whose publications refashioned American notions of prestige, whose editors became celebrities themselves, and whose diminution offers a cautionary tale of class, hubris, and technological change, even as its aesthetic and ethos remain influential to this day.”

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August is usually a slow month in publishing, but this August is chockfull of interesting books. At the top of my list are: James Hankins and Allen C. Guelzo’s first volume of a history of the West called The Golden Thread: The Ancient World and Christendom (Encounter, August 26), Fergus Butler-Gallie’s Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity (Simon & Schuster, August 26), David Mamet’s new novel, Some Recollections of St. Ives (Arcade, August 5), and a new translation of The Aeneid (Liveright, August 12) from Scott McGill and Susannah Wright. Other books of note include:

Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography (FSG, August 12): “A long-awaited and much-anticipated biography of one of the great modern poets.”

Graham Watson, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life (Pegasus, August 5): “Charlotte Brontë had a life as seemingly dramatic as her heroine Jane Eyre. Turning her back on her tragic past, Charlotte reinvented herself as an acclaimed author, a mysterious celebrity, and a passionate lover. Doing so meant burning many bridges, but her sudden death left her friends and admirers with more questions than answers. Tasked with telling the truth about Brontë’s life, her friend, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, uncovered secrets of illicit love, family discord, and professional rivalries more incredible than any fiction. The result, a tell-all biography, was so scandalous it was banned and rewritten twice in six months—but not before it had given birth to the legend of the Brontës. The Invention of Charlotte Brontë presents a different, darker take on one of the most famous women writers of the nineteenth century, showing Charlotte to be a strong but flawed individual. Through evaluating key events as well as introducing new archival material into the story, this lively biography challenges the established narrative to reveal the Brontë family as they’ve never been seen before.”

Nathan Kernan, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler (FSG, August 5): “Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler is the definitive biography of the great American poet who, along with Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, was one of the original members of the so-called New York School of poetry. Kernan opens with Schuyler’s legendary first public reading in 1988 and goes back to trace the tumultuous arc of the poet’s life and work.”

I wouldn’t say Schuyler was “great,” though he was occasionally very good. This book also might prove an interesting companion to the biography: Jason Lagapa, Unimportant Clerks: The New York School Poets and the Culture of Bureaucracy (SUNY Press, August 1): “Unimportant Clerks identifies a central tension in the writing of the New York School poets: at times their poetry replicates the ideology of bureaucracy while at others—and more persistently—it repudiates related principles of efficiency, routine, and regimentation. Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Eileen Myles each had a clerical or secretarial job at the start of their professional careers. Heirs to Melville’s Bartleby and antecedents of our own era of ‘quiet quitting,’ they by necessity channeled their creativity into everyday practices of refusing work.” For aficionados only, of course.

Someone needs to ask my friend, Dominic Green, to review this book: Seth Alexander Thévoz, London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious (Robinson, August 26): “Step into the hidden world of London's private members’ clubs with London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious. This guide, by the leading historian on the subject, offers a fascinating insight into these legendary institutions. Culture, history and traditions are all explained—from aristocratic haunts like Boodle's and Brooks’s, to modern icons like Soho House and the Groucho Club.”

Daniel J. Flynn, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank Meyer (Encounter, August 5): “The Man Who Invented Conservatism unveils one of the twentieth century’s great untold stories: a Communist turned conservative, an antiwar activist turned soldier, and a free-love enthusiast turned family man whose big idea captured the American Right. This intellectual migration coincided with a clandestine affair inside 10 Downing Street, service as a lieutenant to the man who later constructed the Berlin Wall, and neighborly chats with the pop-star and poet celebrity next door. Present at the creation of National Review, Meyer helped launch Joan Didion’s writing career. From H. G. Wells to Henry Kissinger to Milton Friedman, he rubbed shoulders with everyone who mattered.”

James Grant, Friends Until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution (Norton, August 12): “Friends Until the End tells the story of two men who hailed from different worlds, yet thrived together in the London intellectual sphere. With wit and panache, James Grant traces their relationship through three great events: the American Revolution; the impeachment of the East India Company’s governor-general; and the French Revolution, which ended their political union and shattered their friendship. Fox, the cosseted heir of a rich English political family, sported George Washington’s colors in London during the American revolution, while Burke, the son of an Irish lawyer, opened Warren Hastings’s 1778 impeachment trial with remarks that lasted four days. Before their rupture, both men enthusiastically shared a love of language and literature, trading Latin tags and Shakespearean quotations between speeches in Parliament. Today, Burke’s writing forms the intellectual core of modern conservativism, while Fox’s ideals and oratory inspired generations of nineteenth-century English Whigs and Liberals. As Grant shows, Fox and Burke were uniquely suited to their long, enduring careers marked by political opposition―they possessed the fluency, self-command, and principle that allowed them to resist, most often, what they regarded as an overreaching British crown. Along with the men’s two remarkable lives, Friends Until the End illuminates their era’s politics, economics, and lessons for our divided times.”

Iain Pears, Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent (Norton, August 5): “Best-selling novelist and art historian Iain Pears enchants readers with the real-life romance between Larissa Salmina, a Russian art curator, and Francis Haskell, a British art historian. His fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting.”

Peter Cozzens, Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West (Knopf, August 19): “The true story of the Black Hills gold rush settlement once described as ‘the most diabolical town on earth’ and of its most colorful cast of characters, from Wild Bill Hickok to Calamity Jane to Al Swearingen and Sheriff Seth Bullock.”

Paul Andrew Hutton, The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West (Dutton, August 5): “The Undiscovered Country strips away the layers of myth to reveal the true story of this first epoch of American history. From the forests of Pennsylvania and Kentucky to the snow-crested California Sierras, and from the harsh deserts of the Southwest to the buffalo range of the Great Plains, Paul Andrew Hutton masterfully chronicles a story that defined America and its people. From Braddock’s 1755 defeat to the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, he unfolds a grand narrative steeped in romantic impulses and tragic consequences.”

Martha Barnette, Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland (Abrams, August 5): “Martha Barnette has spent two decades as the co-host of A Way with Words, lauded by Mary Norris in The New Yorker as ‘a virtual treasure house’ and ‘“Car Talk” for Lexiphiles.’ Over that time, she’s developed a keen sense of what fascinates people about language. They are curious about etymology and revel in slang, are surprised by regional vocabulary and celebrate linguistic diversity. Idioms both puzzle and delight word lovers, and they are eager to share family neologisms and that weird phrase Grandma always used to say. In Friends with Words, Barnette weaves together all these strands in a clear, informative, highly entertaining exploration of language.”

Catherine Conybeare, Augustine the African (Liveright, August 5): “Augustine of Hippo (354–430), also known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including the autobiographical Confessions and The City of God, helped shape the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy. But for many centuries, Augustine’s North African birth and Berber heritage have been simply dismissed. Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, here puts the ‘African’ back in Augustine’s story. As she relates, his seminal books were written neither in Rome nor in Milan, but in Africa, where he had returned as a wanderer during a perilous time when the Western Roman Empire was crumbling. Using extant letters and other shards of evidence, Conybeare retraces Augustine’s travels, revealing how his groundbreaking works emerge from an exile’s perspective within an African context.”

Larry Silver, Old Age in Art (Reaktion, August 12): “Old Age in Art shows how elders have been depicted from ancient Greece and Rome to the present century. The book explores portraits, including self-portraits, and stories of older figures in religion, myth, and history, focusing on the theme of wisdom versus folly. Larry Silver also discusses the concept of old age within the Middle Ages and early modern periods. The final chapter examines how renowned artists like Michelangelo, Titian, and Monet turned to experimental forms and new subjects in their later years. This book provides a comprehensive overview of old age in European art history.”

Marcus Bull, The Great Siege of Malta (Allen Lane, August 19): “This superb new account of the siege emphasises the crucial importance of the siege while at the same time putting it in a far wider context. While since mistakenly recast as a climactic battle between the West and the East, it was also much more interesting and nuanced than that—both sides had many other interests and priorities beyond Malta. Süleyman the Magnificent had conquered and subsumed regions from Hungary to the Persian Gulf; Philip II was building an empire in America and Asia.”