Anecdotal Evidence

I love trolling through old magazines, not so much in search of treasure as to gauge the values of our forebears. What did writers and edito...

While reading the history plays again I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember havin...

An amusing coda to  Saturday’s post on major and minor writers:   "I come from a family of minor writers and intend to join that class ...

At the beginning of his 1947 lecture on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – a play he judges “not wholly successful” -- W.H. Auden discuss...

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter / About him at cocktail parties.”   As a reader, my transformative year came in 1965, shortly befor...

The digital age has enabled a new and more generous definition of friendship. Geographical proximity is no longer a necessary component. It’...

How pleasing to learn that friends, seemingly unknown to each other -- compartmentalized as friendships often are -- intersected before we k...