Anecdotal Evidence

“Feeling admiration for someone is a privilege that becomes a calamity when the person we admire dies.”   With age, such calamities prolif...

I sensed in Jane Greer, even through the unreliable conduit of the internet, an ebullient spirit utterly unlike myself, which is why I felt ...

“It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuat...

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...