A NEW BOOK by Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, explores the impact of a year in Paris on three prominent American women who made the trip in the postwar era. While Kaplan, a French professor at Yale, explores the intellectual journey that each woman made, she doesn’t mind dishing the dirt on their lives abroad, and we’re soon on a first-name basis with them: Jackie, Susan, and Angela.

AS THE 2013 CENTENARY of William Inge’s birth approaches, his plays continue to be produced even as some critics consider his work creaky, dated, and beyond resuscitation. …

IF PIERRE S. DU PONT II (1870-1954) loved anyone in his long life, it was Lewes Andrew Mason, the young man who worked at Longwood Gardens as his driver and handyman. Doubtless Pierre felt affection for his wife, Alice Belin du Pont (1872-1944), but a working man from Delaware won his heart. …

Psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing died in 1902, but a year later his ideas about sexual inversion would inform the professional discourse about human sexuality that arose in the wake of the highly publicized trial of child-murderer Andreas Dippold. This scandal, which rocked Germany for months and years, has recently been retold by Michael Hagner in Der Hauslehrer: