Issue

A LIFETIME AGO, A QUIET STRANGER passed through the author’s hometown and came away with a record of both personal and national importance.

A hundred and fifty years ago, famine in Ireland fostered a desperate, unprecedented mass-migration to America. Neither country has been the same since.

Can it be fair? Humane? Does it deter crime? These very current questions troubled Americans just as much in the day of the Salem witch trials as in the day of Timothy McVeigh.

He was in the vanguard of that wave of young Britons who, in the 1960s, stormed our shores and gave us back our musical heritage.