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Why did you decide to write a book about Caravaggio? Is there anything new to say about him, after all these years?

It might seem strange, but even though Caravaggio is one of the most obsessed-about and massively popular artists of all time, an extraordinary amount of devastatingly interesting and revealing new information has come out about him in recent years. I am talking about new, hard, archival discoveries, a truly astonishing treasure trove of documents from the distant past – new facts about the prostitutes with whom he consorted, the women (and perhaps men) with whom he had sex; the soldiers, mercenaries and thugs with whom he fought and argued; the other painters with whom he contested; the man he murdered in a castration-attempt on a tennis court in Rome in the summer of 1606; the man he shot and near-fatally wounded on the brutal military island of Malta a few years later; the gang of four who pinned him down and cut his face off in Naples, condemning him to a terrible, slow, lingering death …

What sets your biography apart from others that have been written about him?

All of this new stuff had been discovered by scholars working in different places in different, disconnected ways. Some of it had been published, but generally only in aracane or extremely academic corners. No one had put it together, however. So I did. Whether the reader thinks I have done a good job with the information, the information itself is transformative in terms of what we know and think about the painter. I think it’s like a bomb dropped into the still waters of existing Caravaggio literature. Basically, my book is the first to bring all of this information together for the general reader. As a result, I believe it is the first book about him truly to tell the full story of who he was, why he did what he did, and ultimately what happened to him.

Is this your first self-interview?

Yes and no. It’s the first time I’ve ever been asked to create an entire interview but it’s been my experience that most interviewers (who aren’t me) end by asking: “Is there anything else you’d like to add? Have I missed anything important?” So I’ve actually contributed at least one question to zillions of interviews.

And that’s not all. I’m also in the habit of asking myself questions as I cycle or swim; remind me to buy a fake earpiece so onlookers assume I’m speaking on a cellphone and don’t call the men in white uniforms (with straitjackets and handcuffs in their pockets) to take me away.

Are you enjoying this self-interview?

I am! It seems to be going much better than I’d anticipated. I was really nervous about whether or not I could answer my questions.

Is there any question people frequently ask you about your Mistresses book?

Yes! Why wasn’t so-and-so wasn’t included in my book?

For example?

For example, Lou Andreas-Salome, identified by one writer as “the most notorious woman in the intellectual world of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Europe. Rilke and Neitzsche had both courted Lou, and Nietzsche who did not generally think much of women, went so far as to ask Lou to marry him…”

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Where did you get the idea to write And the War Came?

Watching Chris Matthews talk about Christine O’Donnell, who, in case you may have already forgotten, was briefly famous last year for being a Tea Party insurgent who won the Delaware Republican primary. I realized that when most of us study history, we read about great figures and landmark moments, and it can get really boring really fast because everything is chiseled in marble and written in granite, and it doesn’t seem real. Whereas the way we experience politics in our daily lives is with tumult and energy, with nobodies vying for attention and often eclipsing truly significant people, with bad ideas outshouting good ones. And in no period was this more true than in the six months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

How so?

This was the most intensely political period in American history. There were four candidates in the election of 1860. Lincoln won less than forty percent of the vote. Only a late surge by Lincoln in New York kept the election from being thrown into the House of Representatives. After that, the states began thinking about secession. The usual phrase we hear is “The South seceded.” In fact, there were 15 states where slavery was illegal, and so there were fifteen separate debates about what to do. Several went quickly, but four of the states did not secede at all. Virginia and Tennessee at first voted against secession before voting for it. The slaveholding faction almost certainly resorted to vote fraud to take Georgia out, and there was practically a coup in Virginia before the governor supported secession.

Opinion in the north was just as divided. New York business interests wanted to appease the south. Abolitionist New Englanders said good riddance. A faction thought they should let the slave states leave in peace, confident that they would come crawling back. And others believed that the Union was worth preserving, and that these rebels should not be permitted to have their way.

What light could history shine on this feeling of an Enlightenment lost, perhaps before ever reaching any real apex?

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