Double Agent is a watershed in the recent revival of interest in the role of the public critic and intellectual who writes about culture, politics, and the arts for an intelligent general audience. Offering acute portraits of critics both famous and neglected, Dickstein traces the evolution of cultural criticism over the last century from Matthew Arnold to New Historicism. He examines the development of practical criticism, the rise and fall of literary journalism, and the growth of American Studies, and rereads the work of critics like Arnold, Walter Pater, I.A. Richards, Roland Barthes, Edmund Wilson, R.P. Blackmur, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and George Orwell. In essays and books that are themselves works of literature, these writers made criticism central to the public sphere, balancing social and literary values, politic commitment and aesthetic judgment. Though marginalized or ignored by academic histories of criticism, their example has proved immensely valuable for younger critics eager to find a personal voice and reach a wider public. Dickstein concludes with a lively and provocative dialogue that weighs the claims of recent literary theory and the importance of renewing public culture.

"Mary Stuart's execution remains an entirely unacceptable crime morally (...) However, it is equally difficult to deny that the destruction of Mary Stuart was a prudent course of action from a public policy standpoint. Because, regrettably, in politics, the determining issue is not the correctness of a legislation, but its success." Stefan Zweig was enchanted with Mary Stuart, whose life he perceived as immensely paradoxical and from whom he perceived a "inexhaustible attraction of mystery." Thus, he investigated the queen of Scotland and Elizabeth I's fierce rival through the lens of a novelistic biography. Zweig is the undisputed master of this genre: he meticulously details the tumultuous life of this amazing woman, who culminated on the scaffold. Biography Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born into a Jewish commercial family in Vienna. He created poetry, stories, plays, and essays, all of which were burned by the Nazis in 1933. He resided in Salzburg from 1919 until 1934, then moved to England and then to Brazil in 1941. His epic works, like his historical miniatures and biographical works, made him famous. He deliberately put up his life in Petrópolis, Brazil, on February 23, 1942.

This volume gathers a collection of Hamburger's shorter poems written since his Collected Poems in 1994. It includes strong and sinuous poems which are alert to the intersections of past and present, of continuity and change.