The books in Peter Brown’s “Wild Robot” trilogy were the first to wallop my son with the mix of tragedy and joy that define great art and also real life.

Peter Brown is the emperor of the history of Late Antiquity, a period he defines as roughly between A.D. 200 and 700. Following Gibbon in “Decline and Fall,” we used to call these centuries an ...

Peter Brown is the author of "The Wild Robot," which was turned into an Oscar-nominated movie. My 7-year-old son is obsessed with both the movie and the book and wanted to interview Brown.