There aren’t a lot of distinguished biographies of famous historians. The reading public is largely interested in their works, rather than their personal lives, and while some achieved a certain fame or honor in their time — Thomas Babington Macaulay, Marc Bloch, A.J.P. Taylor, Charles A. Beard, a handful of others — details of scholarly […]

Even before his nomination to the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush in 2005, Justice Samuel Alito was dogged by the nickname “Scalito.” The lazy conflation of Alito with Justice Antonin Scalia, both conservative jurists of Italian-American heritage, was irresistible to journalists who saw the court as a battleground for politics by other means, […]