Anecdotal Evidence

“A dull country magistrate gave Johnson a long tedious account of his exercising his criminal jurisdiction, the result of which was his havi...

Among my teachers when I was young was a man I never met. In fact, he had died several years before I enrolled in his school. Oscar Williams...

I had seen the phrase before and guessed correctly at its meaning from context but still found the expression puzzling: “widow’s weeds.” It ...

A pivot or lasting change of focus occurred to me as a teenager. For years, since probably late toddlerhood, I had thought of myself as a bu...

In a letter to his friend the Rev. William Unwin, written in March 1784, nine months before Dr. Johnson’s death, William Cowper says he is “...

Walter Jackson Bate tells us in his biography of Dr. Johnson that as he aged, the crusty old man mellowed. “[I]n many ways,” Bate writes, “h...

Neighbors gave us a sack of golf-ball-size peaches from the tree in their front yard. I’ve been watching it for months through the front win...