Anecdotal Evidence

I sensed in Jane Greer, even through the unreliable conduit of the internet, an ebullient spirit utterly unlike myself, which is why I felt ...

“It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuat...

Dr. Johnson famously contributed several couplets to Oliver Goldsmith’s “ The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society ” (1764), including:   ...

A reader asks if I remember diagramming sentences. In math I was competent and uninspired but almost anything with words constituted play ti...

Deciding which of Chekhov’s more than five-hundred stories is the finest is a happily futile task. He is a reader’s pipe dream: a great writ...

Most serious readers, I suspect, have enthusiasms they recognize as virtually indefensible. It would never occur to me, for instance, to mou...

Almost half a century ago, in a small town in Northwestern Ohio, I knew a man who read Joseph Conrad the way some people read their Bible – ...

I came late to Louis MacNeice – preoccupied as I was, like many before me, with his friend W.H. Auden – and have tried to make up for my tar...

One of my favorite essays was written about prose by a poet. No paradox there. Apart from the strictures of meter and rhyme, there’s no good...

I love trolling through old magazines, not so much in search of treasure as to gauge the values of our forebears. What did writers and edito...

While reading the history plays again I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember havin...

An amusing coda to  Saturday’s post on major and minor writers:   "I come from a family of minor writers and intend to join that class ...

At the beginning of his 1947 lecture on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – a play he judges “not wholly successful” -- W.H. Auden discuss...

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter / About him at cocktail parties.”   As a reader, my transformative year came in 1965, shortly befor...

The digital age has enabled a new and more generous definition of friendship. Geographical proximity is no longer a necessary component. It’...

How pleasing to learn that friends, seemingly unknown to each other -- compartmentalized as friendships often are -- intersected before we k...

“Perhaps you know this word, but I didn’t: ‘cromulent.’   I've seen examples of it used to describe players of different sports.”   So...

While reading the history plays again, I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember havi...