Anecdotal Evidence

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...

One of my favorite essays was written about prose by a poet. No paradox there. Apart from the strictures of meter and rhyme, there’s no good...