Anecdotal Evidence

“It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuat...

Dr. Johnson famously contributed several couplets to Oliver Goldsmith’s “ The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society ” (1764), including:   ...

A reader asks if I remember diagramming sentences. In math I was competent and uninspired but almost anything with words constituted play ti...

Deciding which of Chekhov’s more than five-hundred stories is the finest is a happily futile task. He is a reader’s pipe dream: a great writ...

Most serious readers, I suspect, have enthusiasms they recognize as virtually indefensible. It would never occur to me, for instance, to mou...

Almost half a century ago, in a small town in Northwestern Ohio, I knew a man who read Joseph Conrad the way some people read their Bible – ...

I came late to Louis MacNeice – preoccupied as I was, like many before me, with his friend W.H. Auden – and have tried to make up for my tar...