Thirty years ago this month, I sat in a suburban movie house and watched America’s sweetheart stumble backward into love. No, the picture wasn’t Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, or You’ve Got Mail, though those 1990s classics deserve columns of their own. Rather, it was a film that nearly fell apart before it could be […]

“An autobiography is not our private story, but rather the baggage we carry with us,” Pope Francis said in his recollections, which were published this year. As the head of the Catholic Church for a dozen years, Francis was known for carrying his own bags, settling his own bills, and making his own phone calls. […]

Some historical fiction is uncontroversial because it presents the past merely as a backdrop for a story that does not suggest new facts or challenge widely accepted interpretations. Other successful creations go the other way, dispensing with the truth so brazenly that they render caveats fatuous because their narratives aren’t so much revisionist history as […]

America has fewer grand homes-turned-museums than Europe, for the perfectly simple reason that there have been Americans living grandly for so much less time. New York City has an unusually small number, and most of these bear no resemblance to their original uses. The Frick Collection is different. The museum, overlooking Central Park on Manhattan’s […]