In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalled sitting at the Café Lilas with the poet Evan Shipman and discussing the Constance Garnett translation of War and Peace. "They say it can be improved on.... I'm sure it can although I don't know Russian," Shipman said. "But we both know translations. But it comes out as a hell of a novel, the greatest I suppose, and you can read it over and over." Shipman was right, and most people who have read the novel in English would have agreed with him: despite the

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In November 2003, an American socialite living in Hong Kong served her millionaire banker husband a drugged milkshake, bludgeoned him to death, wrapped him in a carpet, dumped him in a storage closet and then rang up a moving company.


Most commentators turn it into a parable about the evils of wealth.

The Kissels certainly had a lot of it. As a fresh New York University business school grad, he started off with a small investment house but soon jumped to Lazard Frères, where he made his name in

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