Anecdotal Evidence

Sometimes I suspect I’m a country man marooned in the city, though I grew up in the suburbs. Years ago I read an anthropologist who theorize...

I think I understand a reader who fails to share my pleasure in reading Montaigne. It’s easy to think of the Frenchman as a blowhard whose e...

In 1943, at age forty-three, Yvor Winters was safely beyond draft age but tried to secure a commission in the U.S. Army. He was turned down ...

“Such places are not merely shops. They are glorious strongholds of true civilisation. They refuse to flatter the customer, to congratulate ...

My middle son, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, is visiting for a few days. The conversation turned to nostalgia. He’s young and cont...

In the early evening of January 22, 1900, Jules Renard learns that his older brother, Maurice, who works for the State Railways, has fainted...

In Wednesday’s post I quoted an 1895 profile of Max Beerbohm in which the anonymous writer referred to Beerbohm’s reputed “passion for parad...