Anecdotal Evidence

“Perhaps you know this word, but I didn’t: ‘cromulent.’   I've seen examples of it used to describe players of different sports.”   So...

R.S. Gwynn takes a story related by Izaak Walton in The Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670) and turns it into a poetic  fable of humility and...

“As for a book to mark the settled sobriety of my advanced years, I keep Boswell’s Life of Johnson close by. Its praise of steady judgment...

The best thing about Independence Day in the United States is that no one is obligated to observe it. And if you do, regardless of how eccen...

In Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), the historian  Allen C. Guelzo quotes the nineteenth-century English Liberal stat...

No writer’s death during my lifetime has so numbed me, left me unwilling to accept the news, as Vladimir Nabokov’s. On a muggy night in Youn...

The Battle of Malvern Hill was fought near Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederacy, on July 1, 1862. Not as well remembered as Antieta...