A lot of work goes into maintaining a proper library, let alone a proper library housed in a mid-18th century Baroque palace and featuring thousands of texts dating as far back as the 1300s. If that ...

The National Library of France has undergone an extensive renovation, and relics from Charlemagne to Voltaire are now on display. By Elaine Sciolino PARIS — King Dagobert’s bronze throne.

THANKS to its sense of form and powers of consolidation, eighteenth-century England is one of the great eras or cultures that seem fairly possible to encompass. Civilized, urbane, we say of it; or, ...