● Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle By Edward Wakeling I. B. Tauris, 480 pages, $49 Most biographies of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the English logician and Anglican deacon who signed “Alice in Wonderland” with the pen name Lewis Carroll, misunderstood their subject entirely. In his new book, Edward Wakeling persuasively argues that Carroll was…
In the past 50 years, armchair theorists have accused numerous prominent Victorians of being the Whitechapel murderer. Here are the most outrageous suspects. Lewis Carroll The anagrams of sentences in Carroll’s books described the killings in detail, Richard Wallace argued in his 1996 book “Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend.” King Leopold II of Belgium The…
● Jews and Jewishness in British Children’s Literature By Madelyn Travis Routledge, 200 pages, $125 American book mavens who have delighted in growing up reading works by zesty authors who have a strong sense of Jewish identity, such as E. L. Konigsburg and Maurice Sendak, should be aware that readers in other countries are not…
The Belgian Jewish author Lydia Flem explored her family’s heritage in 2004’s “How I Cleared Out My Parents’ House” (Comment j’ai vidé la maison de mes parents) from Les éditions du Seuil. Holocaust survivors, Flem’s parents never spoke of their wartime sufferings. Flem, spared the horror of her family’s history, writes that her generation “had…
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