On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.

Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published two years later, made Mr....

In the late 18th century, it was a dangerous idea, a political view that could entail deportation to the penal colonies. But the revered Scots poet Robert Burns was openly discussing republican sentiments in the last months of his life, risking punitive action for challenging the authority of the king, an expert in Scottish literature has found.

In a biography to mark the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth, Prof Robert Crawford of St Andrews University has unearthed new evidence which he believes is conclusive proof that Burns was a democrat who sympathised with the French revolution.

A private journal written by a contemporary of Burns records meeting the poet and a friend in Dumfries, two months before he died there in July 1796, aged 37. The diary by James Macdonald recalled: "They were both staunch republicans." Crawford said this claim could have had explosive consequences for Burns: "It was dangerous to be called that then."
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For her 13th birthday, on June 12, 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a gift from her parents. It was a diary, with a red gingham cover. In one of her first entries, on June 20, she wrote: "It seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a 13-year-old schoolgirl."

Rarely can a writer's prediction have been so far off the mark. The Diary of Anne Frank, first published in 1947, has become the best-selling book in the world after the Bible. It is perhaps the most celebrated book of the 20th century. Written with wit and insight, the diary presents the best-known life story of all the six million people who lost their lives during the Holocaust. And it is this story that BBC1 has decided to dramatise in a riveting new five-part serial, adapted by novelist Deborah Moggach, that starts on Monday.

The details of Anne's extraordinary life bear repetition. Just a few weeks...

In a biography to mark the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth this month, Professor Robert Crawford, of St Andrews University, has unearthed new evidence which he believes shows the poet was a democrat.

At the time, the British aristocracy was extremely worried about the risks of radical ideas spreading in Britain following the French revolution and of threats to George III's life.

But Prof Crawford has discovered a private journal, written by a contemporary of Burns, which records meeting the poet and a friend in Dumfries, two months before he died there in July 1796, aged 37.

The diary by James Macdonald says: "They were both staunch republicans."

Expressing such sentiments could have resulted in Burns being deported to a penal colony in Australia.

Prof Crawford said: "Particularly towards the end of his life in the 1790s, democracy was a dirty word. It was a word associated with terrorism, a word which has...

There is an ungainly German word, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, that has no equivalent in the English language. It means "coming to terms with past," and it was coined to refer to the efforts of German intellectuals, journalists, and even some politicians who, over the past half century, insisted that facing unpleasant truths about their country's history was both a moral and political necessity. As a result of these efforts, Vergangenheitsbewältigung has become part of the core political culture of contemporary Germany.

A new German movie that has attracted considerable attention in Europe is part of this tradition--albeit in an unusual way. While Vergangenheitsbewältigung generally refers to examination of the Nazi era, this film looks at another chapter in German history: the rise, during the 1970s, of a radical left-wing group called the Red Army Faction (or the Baader-Meinhof Gang, after its leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof). Obviously, the group's...

The 200th birthday celebration next month for Edgar Allan Poe has resulted in a friendly tussle among major East Coast cities about which has the strongest ties to the American author.

Poe - author of "The Raven," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and other poems and tales of the macabre - was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1809. He was raised largely in Richmond. As an adult, he migrated between Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York.

Befitting his difficulty establishing roots, Poe will be feted at birthday parties in those five cities in January. Events will continue throughout the year - including new museum exhibits, performances and readings of Poe's work, academic conferences and, in Baltimore, a reenactment of his funeral that is sure to draw more mourners than the hasty burial itself.

The push to honor Poe dovetails with an escalating debate about the places that were most important to the author's life and work.

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After almost a decade of development, officials behind a Washington, D.C. memorial to former President Dwight Eisenhower are close to picking a designer.

The selection among four finalists -- Gehry Partners, Los Angeles; Krueck and Sexton, Chicago; Rogers Marvel Architects, New York; and PWP Landscape Architecture, Berkley, Calif. -- is expected in March.

"Eisenhower is overdue," said Carl Reddel, executive director of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. "One of these designers will have the opportunity to bring Ike's legacy of integrity, leadership and public service to the forefront of American thought."

The four-acre site several blocks from the U.S. Capitol will be the first national presidential memorial of the 21st century. It will sit across the street from the National Air and Space Museum, which is fitting as Eisenhower is credited with establishing the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA.

... Some unique sites are in the middle of Washington yet off the beaten path for most tourists. One example, the Decatur House museum, was the first neighbor of the White House built on Lafayette Square in 1818. The house, once an unofficial residence for secretaries of state, includes slave quarters within steps of the White House - though they usually go unnoticed amid the hustle of the city.

"It's a sensitive subject. It's an important subject, though," museum director Cindi Malinick said of an exhibit on black history in the White House neighborhood. "The more we discuss it and discuss ... how these people lived and worked and got through their lives, I think the better off we all will be as a society."

Decatur House, now administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, holds one of the few remaining examples of urban slavery in the United States, Malinick said.

It was there that 15 members of the King and...

Before the jungles of Bolivia swallowed him up, Che Guevara had enjoyed a run of success as a doctor, a revolutionary and, especially in his late career, as a student dormitory poster.

"Che lives!" we of the great unwashed cried in the Sixties, and, more than 40 years after his death, it seems only right that he remains insistently among us – as an idea, a global brand, and, in these times of capitalism's crisis, a useful provocation.

His old pal, Fidel Castro, is still in business in Cuba, new books continue to feed the Guevara legend, and now, lumbering onto the pop-cultural battlefield like some huge, agitprop-lobbing trench mortar, comes Steven Soderbergh's four-hour-plus, two-part Hollywood biopic Che.

The film, starring Oscar-winner Benicio del Toro in the title role, has sharply divided opinion, with grown Frenchmen weeping in the aisles during its first outing at Cannes, while outraged Cuban exiles hurled bottles of habanero salsa at the screen in Miami. Some...