Anecdotal Evidence

Most serious readers, I suspect, have enthusiasms they recognize as virtually indefensible. It would never occur to me, for instance, to mou...

Almost half a century ago, in a small town in Northwestern Ohio, I knew a man who read Joseph Conrad the way some people read their Bible – ...

I came late to Louis MacNeice – preoccupied as I was, like many before me, with his friend W.H. Auden – and have tried to make up for my tar...

One of my favorite essays was written about prose by a poet. No paradox there. Apart from the strictures of meter and rhyme, there’s no good...

I love trolling through old magazines, not so much in search of treasure as to gauge the values of our forebears. What did writers and edito...

While reading the history plays again I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember havin...

An amusing coda to  Saturday’s post on major and minor writers:   "I come from a family of minor writers and intend to join that class ...