Anecdotal Evidence

Over the weekend I read a book review full of enthusiastic approval that was so poorly written, anything the critic had to say was immediate...

It’s a commonplace to say you can read a serious reader’s autobiography on his bookshelves. For some of us you can say the same of the libra...

The most casually intelligent person I have ever known was D.G. Myers , who died on this date, September 26, in 2014. I prize intelligence b...

“My first novel, Bright Center of Heaven , is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired. In a symposium at Smith College, Saul Bel...

The first stanza of C.H. Sisson’s “The Red Admiral” ( Exactions , 1980):   “The wings tremble, it is the red admiral Ecstatically agains...

Clive James in his essay on Louis Armstrong in Cultural Amnesia (2007):   “[F]or the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot fro...

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023):   “[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experie...