When “Inside the Third Reich” by Albert Speer, arrived in bookstores in 1970, the Vietnam war was raging unabated. In an interview with...

It was a glittering array of talent. Vice president Lyndon Johnson was deeply impressed. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he...

George Frederick Handel was German--and a contemporary of Johann Sebastion Bach--who lived most of his adult life in London. Unlike...

"England is a nation of shopkeepers." Thus spake Napoleon. Napoleon Bonaparte wasn't being complimentary. It was a put-down, his way of...

Who knew? While the Beatles (raised on American Rock 'n' Roll) were perfecting their sound in the waterfront clubs of Hamburg, Germany,...

My two sons were surprised. None of their high schools friends had ever heard of the Byrds. They’d heard of the Beatles—of course—and...

When I was 12-years old, my brother brought home from the library “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Judging by...

While making the motion picture "Grand Prix" in 1966, filmmaker John Frankenheimer went to Reims, site of that year's French Grand Prix,...

From Richard's son, Bill: My father's birthday was in August. I care about my father, and I care about all life. I, of course, have known...

Book Review: The Infidel and the Professor, by Dennis C. Rasmussen The “infidel” is David Hume and “the professor” is Adam Smith, two...

Henry Manney, wit, sage, and European Editor for ROAD & TRACK magazine in the 1960s, would stand behind a stone barn outside Burnenville...

Of all the great composers, none had a bigger ego than Richard Wagner (pronounced Ree-card Vawg-ner). Wagner (1813-1883) was famously...

Frank Sinatra was famous for “My Way”— the song and what it said about him. Music was personal for Sinatra. It was the one thing in his...

At the age of eight he was playing piano and composing music that your high-school music teacher could only dream of doing. It was only a...

“Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news,” sang Chuck Berry in one of Rock’s classics. It seems Pyotr (that's Peter to you)...

Beatles' producer George Martin called him "The Three-Minute Mozart". He was referring to Paul McCartney, of course, and to his gift for...

Robert Schumann achieved fame in the mid-nineteenth century--after Beethoven, and before Brahms and Wagner were recognized as musical...

Not all composers possess gigantic egos. Franz Schubert is a case in point. Shy, quiet, bespectacled, known but to a small cadre of...

Orchestral music had moved from the parlors of the nobility and into the public forums by the time Johannes Brahms made his mark in the...

If you were in Vienna in, say, 1780, and looking for the world-famous composer Wolfgang Mozart, chances are you’d find him at the local...