Christopher de Bellaigue’s “The Lion House” is a history of the 16th-century Ottoman sultanate that reads like a novel, overflowing with naval battles, high-stakes diplomacy, opulence, avarice and brutality.
Drawing on newly released letters from the poet to Emily Hale, with whom he maintained a decades-long, mostly epistolary affair, “The Hyacinth Girl,” by Lyndall Gordon, reconsiders his life and work.
It’s among the world’s oldest forms of government, but it’s increasingly under threat. These books consider the sources and effects of an alarming global trend.
From schools to free food and health care, the group’s majority female membership carried out life-sustaining, grass-roots programs that went far beyond politics.