Anecdotal Evidence

“Until recently, I considered David Copperfield to be the best English-language novel I’d read. No longer. This side of Tolstoy, I know of ...

My review of Vasily Grossman’s From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin (New York Review Books, 2026) is published in the Fall iss...

In his Spectator essay for January 15, 1712 , Joseph Addison tells us he spent the day with friends, “an Assembly of Virtuosos,” one of whom...

In 1939, Louise Bogan reviewed for The New Yorker new poetry collections by Archibald MacLeish and Muriel Rukeyser. Her review opens with a...

It was probably the first wildflower I learned to identify. (It always seemed important to know the names of things.) It grew, never densely...

“Style means the necessary word. The rest matters little.”   I sometimes conduct an informal test on a piece of prose that either pleases ...

“The words you see are all there is worth seeing.”   Adagia are maxims, proverbs, the root of our current word, adage . It entered Englis...

“This day proving wet, we should have passed our time very uncomfortably, had we not found in the house two chests of books, which we eagerl...