Anecdotal Evidence

One needn’t be a literary populist, jettisoning all critical values, to understand that especially when young we read certain books for the ...

Working in newsrooms for twenty-five years taught me to buffer against distractions. Newsrooms are noisy places – police scanners, televisio...

A thoughtful, well-read reader has taught me a new and useful word: agnoiology. It’s a straight borrow from the Greek word for “ignorance” a...

“My past literary judgments sometimes embarrass me.”   My friend, a man of roughly my age, has just reread Conrad’s Under Western Eyes af...

I always find consolation in T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante” that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood...

“I prefer reading books—those I should have read when younger, those that might awaken me to things I should have known long ago—and rereadi...

“Everyday life is miraculous because it subjects the violent impulses to itself. The Essays of Montaigne are the revelation of the miracle o...