The young woman seated opposite me at the restaurant was an orphan. A few months earlier, her mother had died of cancer. Her father had departed this earth years earlier after a fall from a ladder. Both parents I’d known since college, a bookish pair who remained in the same four-st

The older I get, the more I fall behind the modern culture.  For example, while taping a Just Read It segment on Colm Toibin’s fictionalized biography of Thomas Mann, I was stunned to learn that one of my young guests knew little about one of the twentieth century’s greatest

“What kind of a woman are you?” Henri Matisse screamed at his model as he stood before his canvass.  He and dozens of other Parisian painters in the 1920s, Chagall, Cocteau and Braque among them, would never find out.  Only Picasso refused to paint Mari Lani, a model who became