Anecdotal Evidence

Too often style is judged filigree applied after the house is built. It’s cosmetic, inessential to the building’s structural integrity. Can ...

Eccentricity in books is a tricky quality. It can be charming and inspire lifelong devotion. Take Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy ...

It was April or early May and the snow was going or gone. A low wall of fieldstones surrounded the cemetery in Schoharie County, N.Y. – one ...

On July 30, 1937, the NKVD issued Order No. 00447, signed by Stalin and NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, which mandated the round-up of “ex-kulaks...

“In time we bow / To the necessity and claim profound / Returns in memory.” The spice cupboard was a disorganized mess. Looking for tarrag...

Zbigniew Herbert begins his 1966 essay “Monsieur Montaigne’s Voyage to Italy” with these words: “When a moment comes that my body will hav...

“It’s not a showy word but a worker word, a syntactic functionary; and yet, for all its organizational aplomb, it secretly delights in nuanc...

Jules Renard writes in his journal on July 26, 1899: “More than once I have tried being morose for a whole day. I have not succeeded. Not ev...

“Do you ever feel that you spend too much time with books?”   The answer true to the spirit of the age would be to respond in the positive...

“Feeling admiration for someone is a privilege that becomes a calamity when the person we admire dies.”   With age, such calamities prolif...

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...