Anecdotal Evidence

Boswell and Johnson dined on April 9, 1778, at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Other guests included the Bishop of St. Asaph and Edward Gib...

One of the qualities I most esteem in a friend, apart from brains and adequate hygiene, is the ready ability to make me laugh. When we ponde...

Anton Chekhov was thirty-one years old and had experienced his first haemoptysis (blood coughed from the lungs) seven years earlier, when he...

“From the first he walked through intrigue, pretention, flunkeyism, and despotic arrogance, and, by blasting these qualities with his tongue...

I happened to be reading the poet-historian Robert Conquest when a friend called to tell me her troubles – health, romance, job, the usual l...

I’ve learned that a next-door neighbor from my childhood has died at age ninety-eight: Gert Pirko. Like us, she and her husband and three k...

In his final book, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967), the dying Yvor Wint...