James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, and a successful screenwriter. His sentences are fractured jewels. The details are closely observed, the imagery poetic. Every page contains an observation I want to write...

Sherlock Holmes fans span the range from casual to obsessive. They included Abdulhamid II, the last ruler of the Ottoman Empire to hold absolute power. A description of the sultan having Holmes stories read to him at bedtime set journalist Andrew Finkel off on the flight of fancy that became his...

I first got interested in the Wakhan Corridor when I read The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. This weird bit of political geography once formed a buffer between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Britain. It’s been closed to traffic for more than a century, and it remains one of the world’s least-visited...