At a black tie party at the Four Season's in Manhattan last November 2005, the literary, social and business elite of New York gathered to mark the annual Kenyon Review award for literary distinction. The propinquity of New York wealth and philanthropy, with the glitterati of the publishing and literary world made for a special frisson. The atmosphere was further excited by the presence of Michael Bloomberg who had just won a landslide mayoral victory. In his exuberance he composed a short poem: "On the Campaign, the question arose/What big second term plans proposed/Said I, 'First thing I'll do-Toast the Kenyon Review'/After that, really who the hell knows." The melange of pearl-covered and bejewelled women and prominent tuxedo-clad names erupted in a frenzied, excited applause, putting aside the foreboding of recent years.
The host for this special evening was the Kenyon Review, a sixty-year-old quarterly, with a long and well-established pedigree. Founded in 1939, by the poet John Crowe Ransom, the review was associated in its early years with Robert Penn Warren, Mark Van Doren, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Flannery O' Connor, and other American literary lions
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ISBN:0300120486
Caesar:
The Life of a Colossus,

Adrian Goldsworthy,

"Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus," the conspirator Cassius says of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's play. "And we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves." Caesar has long fascinated dramatists, and, more recently, has won the favour of film-makers, novelists, and television producers. Long before Michael Douglas wooed Catherine Zeta-Jones, Rex Harrison's intelligent, utterly self-confident Caesar showed how a middle-aged man could win a youthful Elizabeth Taylor's affections in 1963's Cleopatra.
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Noah Richler was raised in Montreal and London, England. He was a prize-winning producer and host of documentaries and features for BBC Radio for fourteen years before returning to Canada in 1998. He joined the National Post and became its first books editor. He has contributed to publications here and in England. Most recently, he was the host of the CBC's Richler on Radio and of "A Literary Atlas of Canada", a ten-part series for Ideas based on his researches for the book, and now available as a CBC audio-DVD.
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ISBN:0099462613
Orson Welles:
Hello Americans
Simon Callow,

Orson Welles would have greatly enjoyed the recent midterm elections in America-and not from the sidelines either. Had he been alive today, Welles would have been orating on the festooned platform with all the rhetorical grandeur that we associate with his role as Charles Foster Kane. If this seems like an unfamiliar way to begin a review of that seemingly all-too-familiar subject, Welles, the meteoric super-kid and ultimate failure, then look again.

That's what Simon Callow has done in this follow-up to The Road to Xanadu, the first part of a projected trilogy. In that superb work, Callow focused, in convincing detail, on everything the boy wonder had done right up until the premiere, in May 1941, of the world's greatest feature film, Citizen Kane, when the director-writer-producer-star (in all his hyphenated glory) was not yet twenty-six years old....
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ISBN:0895260786
America Alone
The End of the World as We Know It
Mark Steyn,