Garry Wills is a prolific historian, academic, and journalist who started out his writing career on the conservative side of the political spectrum but eventually moved to the left. He recounts his intellectual odyssey in a new memoir, titled “Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer.” The New Criterion, the well-known monthly literary magazine of cultural criticism, published my review of this engaging work, which you’ll find here.

I’ve spent much of the previous year filing Freedom of Information Act requests with various agencies of the United States Government in an effort to learn why the United States State Department denied a travel visa to the world famous Italian novelist Alberto Moravia in 1952. The government eventually released a number of highly interesting, and previously classified, documents to me and I presented the results of my research at a three-day conference in Rome that was dedicated to exploring Moravia’s relationship to America, sponsored by the Associazione Fondo Alberto Moravia, the Association of American College and University Programs in Italy and John Cabot University. Over thirty other distinguished scholars from around the world also delivered papers and the conference proceedings are due to be published as a single bound volume in 2012. To learn more about the conference program click here.

The extraordinary—and, sadly, underappreciated—Czech writer Heda Margolius Kovály died on December 10, 2010, and in the wake of her death I wrote a long “retroreview” of her 1973 memoir, “Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968,” that appears in the May/June 2011 issue of The American Interest Magazine. Kovály was a remarkably courageous woman who suffered at the hands of both the Nazis and the Communists. Her memoir, which deserves to be better known, is essential reading to understand the political tragedies of the twentieth century and is surprisingly relevant to contemporary debates on how to remember the victims of Communist oppression. You’ll find my reflections on Kovály here.