October 2017

It’s not an easy thing to watch one of your favorite authors slide into obscurity. John Fowles, once hailed as the greatest living novelist...

I write to you from the fraying edges of a dying empire. An America assailed by its own bad thoughts. We’ve given the keys of the kingdom to a bunch of hen fuckers. Even from the cold, dark, damp confines of my Appalachian bunker I catch stray signals from the rottenness.

A man is walking alone across the ice; fog is all around him. He believes that he is walking in a straight line. Wind disperses the fog: the man sees his goal, sees his tracks.

“I know of no one today who can make characters come alive the way you do,” Albert Camus wrote to Guilloux in 1946...

Kirkus Reviews is a magazine, though few readers of its work have ever seen a copy. Like the Michelin guides, it’s known for verdicts spread across the publishing world, bringing good books to first attention and helping to sweep aside huge piles of dross.

I am sitting beside a fountain off Broadway, designed like a waterfall. The sound of rushing water softens the heat. The buttery smell of pastries floats up from a nearby bakery.

The Brexiteers have always argued that the outcome of the June 2016 referendum represented the unshakable will of the people. But that is in doubt.

One of Merton’s reveals occurs during a visit to Cuba where the Catholic Church is predominant. There, as a novitiate, he feels so free that he writes “the first real poem I had ever written”

I have wondered, for instance, about the function of the peacock’s flamboyant tail. Would this awkward appendage not more likely get in the way of his attempts to flee a predator?

Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) is known, if known at all, as a quiet, conservative painter — a portraitist of the wealthy and well connected in late 19th- and early 20th-century America.

Shakespeareans are divided, it is well known, into three classes; those who prefer to read Shakespeare in the book; those who prefer to see him acted on the stage; and those who run perpetually from book to stage gathering plunder.

The contribution of my former department to the general gaiety was to be a talk by Margaret Drabble, on the topic of young women at university in the 1960s and 1970s.

Catalonia is an extremely wealthy community with many exceedingly wealthy individuals (many of them current and former Catalan government officials, and many of them suspected of or charged with corruption of fraud).