Anecdotal Evidence

Let’s start with the title of Jonathan Swift’s 1723 poem “Pethox the Great.” A Greek general? A biomed startup? This being Swift, it’s an a...

Last week I wrote about a new book by Nicholas Tate, Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does (Ludovika University Press, B...

“It is the province of poems to make some order in the world, but poets can’t afford to forget that there is a reality of things which survi...

“According to his own statement it was as an escape from the boredom begotten by retirement that the idea of meddling with authorship occurr...

Many of us share a fascination with last words, the final utterances especially of people we admire or detest. Do such words distill the wis...

A reader objects to my frequent dismissal of nature mysticism. I say this as someone who has spent much of his life tramping through woods a...

“ Decline and Fall is still worth reading, not just for historiographical, literary, and psychological reasons, but also for what we still ...