Anecdotal Evidence

“Frivolous subjects? Well, and thank God for it, not everybody can be writing about big, so-called important issues: population, genes, sema...

When someone had eaten his fill and couldn’t take another bite, my maternal grandmother, born the same year as T.S. Eliot, would say, “His s...

I was a lazy student who worked hard when the task interested me and coasted the rest of the time. I dropped out of Latin prematurely becaus...

“Balzac is one of the most shameless traders in stereotype among the great nineteenth-century novelists. As a result, there are passages in ...

Tess Lewis has translated one of Montaigne’s early essays, “Of Pedantry” ( c. 1572-78), in which the Frenchman issues one caution and, mid...

The ideally named English neurologist Russell Brain died in 1966 but his textbook, Brain’s Diseases of the Nervous System (1933), remains in...

If I had been in the house all day reading during a long Ohio winter, invariably my mother would say, “Go outside and blow the stink off.” M...