Henry James

Latest Articles

Grave Spotting

Spooky? A bit, but Massachusetts's cemeteries are also the bucolic, final resting places of many great American writers.
I asked the question this way: "Where would you want to be buried?" Not "do," but "would." That is to say if, by chance, you were to die, unlikely as that might be, where would you want to spend all of nonexistence?
By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | June 16, 2010

Double trouble

BLO's The Turn of the S crew, Levine's Carter and Simon Boccanegra, Teatro Lirico, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, and more
Boston Lyric Opera's debut Opera Annex production was so good in so many ways, it's painful that one bad idea just about sank it.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 09, 2010

John Harbison plus 10

Picking from a packed concert schedule
Classical music in Boston is so rich, having to pick 10 special events for this winter preview is more like one-tenth of the performances I'm actually looking forward to.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 05, 2010

Plain spoken

Colm Tóibín's see-through prose
In American prose, there is a plain style, a child of the 20th century, descending from Hemingway and Cather. The best New Yorker writers — James Thurber, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm — have it.
By WILLIAM CORBETT | June 16, 2009

Three's company

Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese rule at the MFA
The show's American curator, Frederick Ilchman, has snagged an improbable number of pairs and trios from the world's famous (and not so famous) museums.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 11, 2009

Max Ophüls at the Harvard Film Archive

Plaisir d’Ophüls
Max at the Harvard Film Archive
By STEVE VINEBERG | January 20, 2009

Unembarrassed riches

Dutoit and Elder at the BSO, Collage’s Berio, Boston Conservatory’s Turn of the Screw, and Kurt Weill at the Gardner and the MFA
Some weeks Boston has such musical riches, one wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 21, 2008

Turn and face the strange

What would you do to find the perfect mate?
On Delia’s Web site, overly fast typist “Dptanimal” writes: “THE PERFECT WOMAM —– THE ONE YOU ARE IN LOVE WITH !!!”
By DEIRDRE FULTON | February 13, 2008

Innocents abroad?

The BSO prepares to go on tour
Great symphony orchestras don’t just play at home.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | August 22, 2007

Dead white females

From Fall Out Boy to One Night in Paris , modern pop culture is what it is today thanks to 10 long-expired ladies
Can you remember the last time you curled up under the covers with Marcel Proust’s I n Search of Lost Time ?
By SHARON STEEL | August 08, 2007

Love and death

Boston Ballet's "Classic Balanchine" has all the basics
“Classic Balanchine” as opposed to . . . “Jazz Balanchine”? “Porno Balanchine”? What was the alternative?
By JEFFREY GANTZ | May 09, 2007

Get your shoes on and walk about town

Citywatch
Confession: I’m a junkie for narrative.
By CHRISTINA BEVILACQUA | April 04, 2007

Cinema belongs to him

The je ne c’est quoi world of Jacques Rivette
For many backlashing film scholars and canonical cinéastes, most of the big players in the French New Wave — Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Resnais, etc. — have been, over time, at least a touch overrated, save two: Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette.
By MICHAEL ATKINSON | January 03, 2007

Lyrical gangstas

Tenants Harbor group pushes poetry
In 1997, David Riley and four other Tenants Harbor poets decided to become what he calls “ambassadors for poetry in a prose-laden world.”
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 01, 2006

The girls of summer

Frank Benson and Edmund Tarbell at the MFA and the Peabody Essex
Americans, Henry James wrote in 1867, “can pick and choose and assimilate and in short (æsthetically, etc.) claim our property wherever we find it.”
By JEFFREY GANTZ | August 10, 2006

Where is the love?

Kelly Sherman’s wedding seating arrangements, ‘Whistler’s Mother’ at the MFA, and ‘The Din’ in the South End
Kelly Sherman spent this spring exploring the ways in which practical, logistical decisions of a wedding cause couples to confront and mediate family relationships.
By RANDI HOPKINS | June 14, 2006