Algis Valiunas

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.

The Divine Comedy is one of the great works of humanity, but it is good to remember that this extraordinary poet never transcended the sharply circumscribed thought and feeling of human nature. Dante’s is an unforgettable poem, but before you go changing your life on its authority, you should recall that the most reliable authority on the afterlife you will ever have is yourself.

Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a hotbed of genius, and the arch-journalist, poet, and playwright Karl Kraus presided over this efflorescence of art and thought, knowing everything and everybody, making all the right friends and all the right enemies.

For Americans, Shakespeare has been a figure of particular reverence, yearning, and vexation. He has stood for the time-honored refinements of civilization that Americans, as late starters, have not yet had time to nourish into full flower. But he has also been the paragon whom stout-hearted democrats believe themselves destined to surpass.

Like Herodotus, Thucydides, Montaigne, and Proust, Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was a one-book wonder.

The historian’s ideal, and such happiness as he enjoys, is very like the Greek philosopher’s, like Aristotle’s in particular. How far Jacob Burckhardt upheld that ideal is a question that historians and political men will continue to dispute in time to come, for his is a mind that matters, in its passion and dispassion.

Henry Folger made it his life’s work to gather up scattered British treasure and bring it to America for conservation.

A new biography of Josef Goebbels depicts a man consumed by personal ambition, the fate of German culture, and the raving hatred propagated by his master.

A new book on the siege of Leningrad does valuable service to the city’s years of supreme ordeal and the famous tribute by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Just about everyone who pays any attention at all to contemporary fiction knows two things about David Foster Wallace (1962-2008):…