Rob Roy is the British “Birth of a Nation.” It is an adventure story told against the background of a dreadful civil war — in this case, the Jacobite uprising of 1715 — by an artist who idealizes the losers’ culture and the victors’ cause.
At the Passover seder, a young child traditionally asks four questions about the mysterious goings-on: why do we eat bitter herbs dipped in salt water, why do we eat reclining, and so on.
As everyone who ever read Byron or watched “300” knows, the Battle of Thermopylae pitted all the hopes of Western civilization against the oppressive pall of Oriental despotism.
Jonathan Cohn’s Sick belongs to the “60 Minutes” school of journalism: a series of sad human stories deployed to win an argument that is never quite explicitly stated.
Silas Marner is George Eliot’s third full-length novel. Like its predecessors, it is set in the fields and villages of the English Midlands in the days before the Industrial Revolution.