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...

Boswell and Johnson dined on April 9, 1778, at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Other guests included the Bishop of St. Asaph and Edward Gib...

One of the qualities I most esteem in a friend, apart from brains and adequate hygiene, is the ready ability to make me laugh. When we ponde...

Anton Chekhov was thirty-one years old and had experienced his first haemoptysis (blood coughed from the lungs) seven years earlier, when he...

“From the first he walked through intrigue, pretention, flunkeyism, and despotic arrogance, and, by blasting these qualities with his tongue...

I happened to be reading the poet-historian Robert Conquest when a friend called to tell me her troubles – health, romance, job, the usual l...

I’ve learned that a next-door neighbor from my childhood has died at age ninety-eight: Gert Pirko. Like us, she and her husband and three k...

In his final book, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967), the dying Yvor Wint...

I can think of many reasons someone might wish to assemble a reading list and share it with others. Most obviously, teachers drawing up a sy...