Hilary Mantel Continues Her Bloody Brilliant Tudor Saga With Bring Up the Bodies
Two years after Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize, Mantel is back with another dark chapter in her Tudor trilogy
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Adam Scott on Friends with Kids, Party Down and His Long Road to Success
Adam Scott is an unlikely romantic lead. He is slight in stature, with a mop of puffy brown hair that always seems to have a runaway cowlick and a sardonic sneer that he uses convey a comedic level of disbelief. These qualities …
Downton Abbey Watch: Life Is a Game
All good things must come to an end — this season of Downton Abbey, Bates’ death sentence, our quickly dashed dreams of a flappery spin-off called Coming to A-Mary-Ca — but if we have to leave Downton until the fall (or …
Downton Abbey Watch: Mastercheese Theater
Say what you will about Downton Abbey’s melodramatic, overwrought, this-is-just-Dallas-set-on-a-moor twists and turns, but you cannot say that this is a show where nothing ever happens. This week, Julian Fellowes and company …
Downton Abbey Watch: The Ballad of Sad Lady Edith
I think we all know where we have to begin here: Poor Edith. Poor, poor, sad, pathetic, wobbly-chinned Edith. This episode dangled in front of her everything she has always wanted: a romantic future with her cousin (a little …
Downton Abbey Watch: House of Despair
The formula for a cult hit is a tough one to sketch out. Though it seems odd to think of Downton Abbey as anything but a television juggernaut, it wasn’t necessarily destined for iconic status. No one was waiting for an …
Downton Abbey Watch: Missing In Action
If you haven’t heard, World War I is really hot right now. In a full-page editorial in the Sunday New York Times, British novelist William Boyd (who also wrote and directed a movie called The Trench, so we can consider him an …
Downton Abbey Watch: Bayonets Versus Feather Dusters
Last week’s season premiere of Downton Abbey was all about the dissonance between the home front and the real front and how the two worlds could be so closely connected while operating on an entirely separate set of stakes and …
Downton Abbey Watch: Drama and then Somme
The genius of Downton Abbey’s first season was the show’s ability to capture the dizzying claustrophobia of Edwardian life; its idea (props to Upstairs, Downstairs) that one vanilla-frosted house could contain the entire …
1,000 Places to See Before You Die: Traveling to Stay Alive
The first time I saw a copy of 1000 Places to See Before You Die, it was in the midst of an awkward silence. My aunt sat with the heavy tome after having unwrapped the gift, feeling the weight of the book on her lap and trying to …