In the years following Alfred Hitchcock’s death in 1980, an image of him as a dark, vindictive, and lecherous man clung to his memory. More than 20 years later, Film historian Patrick McGilligan re-evaluated the film director’s life in his book, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. McGilligan is no stranger to the Hollywood biography, having published biographies of…

Notre Dame professor of Literature Margaret Doody explores the importance of names and locations in some of Jane Austen’s major works in supplying a rich cultural and historical backdrop for the stories, thus providing vital context for modern readers. Places and names are shown to indicate certain traits in her characters while nodding to important events of British history like…

When investigating the life of a scientific genius such as Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727), it is often difficult to know when or where to begin. In his 84 years, Newton distinguished himself as a preeminent physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, alchemist, and (some would even say) theologian. His contributions to science regarding the laws of motion, universal gravitation, differential calculus, the…

When Albert Einstein came to Berlin in 1914, in the months before the outbreak of the First World War, he was already a well-known figure in the scientific community thanks to his annus mirabilis of 1905 when he published four extraordinary papers which helped change the direction of twentieth-century physics. In Berlin, Einstein was appointed to the Prussian Academy of…

Readers of John Steinbeck’s The Log of the Sea of Cortez will certainly recognize the Western Flyer as the boat that Steinbeck and his friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, hired in 1940 to take them to the Sea of Cortez (the body of water that divides mainland Mexico from the Baja peninsula) on an exploratory and collecting expedition. In…