You have already taken all I have. Now you are taking my son. The words appear on a vast wall. At center stage a man faces a round microphone, as though he is speaking on the radio in 1918. He is reliving the history of Africa in World War I — a […]
Read article
French films honor World War I and a Williams professor who fought in the trenches
On a late summer morning he walks across the quad carrying a stack of French novels. He is dark-haired, spectacled and 40, a quiet man returning to his office. He came here from a farming town in the south of France to teach. And a year ago he was mired […]
Read article
Cubist and Surrealist encounters at the Clark — BTW column
The cloth of her shirt ripples like light on water, and above her three circles of light shine like bubbles or sun on a lens. This is a self-portrait. Dora Maar was about 28 when she made it. I can imagine her in her darkroom, shaping light and shade on […]
Read article
Edith Wharton gets into the trenches in World War I
The tunnel cut into the hill was wholly dark except for “an occasional narrow slit screened by branches.” The gunners had screens behind them, to keep any betraying light from showing where they sat with guns between their knees. Coming out into a “gutted house among fruit trees,” a woman […]
Read article