I just finished reading James Carroll's new novel, The Cloister. I would recommend the book wholeheartedly. One thing did surprise me a little. A major theme of the novel was the relationship between ...

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ONCE more the melancholy history of Abelard and Heloise has inspired an author to retell their woes to a generation eight centuries removed. Again it comes to us in the form of a novel, set, though ...

One wonders quite how Peter Abelard survived, after Heloise's uncle's men "cut off the parts of [his] body whereby [he] had committed the wrong of which they complained". That is, they cut off his ...

Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter When Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980, Simone de Beauvoir - who had shared with him a notorious, lifelong "open" relationship of great ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

Long before sexting and Instagram story replies, people took to the quill, pouring their heart out onto a piece of parchment, and hoping the message made it into the hands of the person they intended.