Anecdotal Evidence

At the beginning of his 1947 lecture on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – a play he judges “not wholly successful” -- W.H. Auden discuss...

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter / About him at cocktail parties.”   As a reader, my transformative year came in 1965, shortly befor...

The digital age has enabled a new and more generous definition of friendship. Geographical proximity is no longer a necessary component. It’...

How pleasing to learn that friends, seemingly unknown to each other -- compartmentalized as friendships often are -- intersected before we k...

“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...