Czeslaw Milosz rsquo s last collection of poems is a thoroughly typical series of lyric exercises deepening and enriching the concerns that preoccupied him during his long career as a poet The 32 poems in Second Space dwell on the mysteries of the human predicament and the movement of history towa

Imagine this Your teenage son has been tortured to death under the regime of a Latin American military dictator Imagine too that instead of quietly succumbing to your grief you publicly denounce the murder and speak out against the regime mdash that of the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner

ldquo Those who live for a time in Rome experience the church rsquo s age but also its youth They experience the church rsquo s breadth and diversity its religious and human wealth but also the limits and weaknesses of its representatives and members rdquo So writes the widely respected Germa

Novels inspired by great works of art are hardly novel but in the past several years their number seems to be growing Tracy Chevalier can claim some credit for the increase since her Girl With a Pearl Earring proved to be both a best-seller and the inspiration for a successful film and her secon

James Gustave Speth dean and professor at Yale University rsquo s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies has written a lively conversational and yet very substantial examination of the failures of global environmental governance to date and an exploration of prospects for the future of the

In The Thing in the Forest the opening story of A S Byatt rsquo s latest collection two young girls evacuated during the last war to the English countryside witness a monstrous creature in a sunlit wood Rolling toward them devouring everything in their path comes a grotesque worm that appea