Algis Valiunas

Jonas Salk’s achievement, a triumph of character as well as of mind, ought never be forgotten. The least impressive intellect among the famous scientists of the twentieth century, he was — aside from Marie Curie — the most impressive human being.

The French composer Charles Gounod will have a lasting if limited place in the opera house because the lightning struck him once or maybe twice, and feeling of high voltage surged into melody of genius.

Napoleon’s latest biographer manages to do justice both to Napoleon’s achievements without flattery and to his grave flaws without invocations of totalitarian oppression or genocidal mania.

Lord Byron defined the species of Romanticism that had the most profound effect on artists and political firebrands of the era, not only in England but throughout Europe, and that has persisted into our own time.

Joseph Conrad remains the greatest English language novelist since Charles Dickens, and many of the best writers of the 20th century, including H.L. Mencken, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot, paid homage to his excellence or came under his influence.

The modern world is sometimes called disenchanted, denuded of magic, because science has annihilated the invisible homeland of the spirits, where angels, demons, and God himself were believed to dwell. But Richard Feynman spoke unabashedly of the wonders and miracles to be found in nature as modern science describes it.

Physics was glorious play for Richard Feynman, as he declared repeatedly, and trying to make some sense of the physical world was his inborn response to what he called the wonder and miracle of Nature.

Last year or perhaps the year before marked the 2,500th anniversary of Herodotus’ birth. We can be grateful still to have his work after all these years, but his bleak teaching does not suit our time and place, which is averse to the tragic sense of life.

There have been very few Renaissance men since the Renaissance—and they weren’t exactly thick on the ground even in their glory days. No modern figure is more worthy of that appellation than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Scholars are out in force this year, observing the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation with new books to commemorate Martin Luther, and to invigorate debate about his legacy.

Frank Lloyd Wright was the kind of genius who recognizes no one’s excellence but his own. Perhaps such outlandish self-regard was what it took to sustain him through years of intense personal pain and drive him to become the protean creator of so much beauty.

Happy is the reader who finds his or her way to Austen, whatever impediments might seem to block the path.