Of all the poems I met in my Grade 11 English Lit survey, Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (ca. 1652) stuck most firmly in my mind. Of…
‘Folk Music & Farce; Show Tunes & Satire; Madness & Escape’: That’s ‘The Midnight Special’ which has run on WFMT in Chicago for 60 years this month. …
Yellowed newspapers and old readers reveal what preceding generations thought important, what shaped our ancestors’ perceptions and ours. At a farm auction in 1958 when I was 12, I found…
In his fine introduction to J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country [1980] (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), Michael Holroyd suggests Carr added in honor of…
Some years ago, I read The Alexiad by the Byzantine Princess Anna Comnena (1081-1151). Her history of her father’s reign, including the uninvited visit to Constantinople by the…
Bennington, Vermont: Old First Church. 4/3/11 Updated: Jan. 11, 2012. What do Jack Benny, John D. Rockefeller and Robert Frost have in common? Each achieved greatness in a fiercely competitive…
In ‘Why I Write’ (1946), George Orwell begins: From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be…