The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren't like you - especially when you lived as that kind of American in Berlin connected to the arts.

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.

I can see Obama trying to be the president who suggests solutions for everyone who has experienced economic hardship.

If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away.

Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about.

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine.