Anecdotal Evidence

William Wordsworth in anyone’s book is a major poet but I seldom read him any longer because I find much of his work dull as dishwater. Ther...

  Knuff , looby , lubber , clotpoll , chucklehead , chuff , bedpresser, fopdoodle , pricklouse , pickthank, jackalent , dandiprant, jobberno...

A reader asks what I make of retirement after fifteen jobless months. I’m mildly surprised by what little difference it makes. I started wor...

“We live in a fanatical age, an age of propaganda, when everybody wants the support of the whole herd in order to be quite at peace in his o...

My wife vows never to shop again at our neighborhood grocery, less than a mile from our house. I agree that a semi-Third World atmosphere pe...

Almost twenty years ago the late poet and Melville scholar Helen Pinkerton urged me to read Wisdom and Wilderness: the Achievement of Yvor W...

In his 1825 essay “On Old English Writers and Speakers,” William Hazlitt rather uncharacteristically waves the Union Jack in rousing defense...