For most of 2026, I have been ill, then convalescent; anxious, then relieved; unsettled, then calmed. I have been bereft of my oldest friend, then set down in a world that is not what it was. Reading and thinking throughout, I have come across many interesting things. But it has been difficult to grasp them …
The other day, a woman said to me that she does not re-read books. This was a statement, not an observation. Life, presumably, is too short, and the bookshelf too long. I did not argue, although I might be inclined to counter that life is too short to waste time on books that you’re not going to …
It has long been my fancy that the first Book of Jane Austen’s Emma could well be subtitled, “The Exploding Cigar.” It is great fun to watch Emma withdraw the big fat cylinder — her marital scheme for Harriet and Mr Elton — from the box of possible amusements, despite the advice of Mr Knightley; and even …
Near the end of Cities on a Hill, her historically weighted report on four “visionary” communities in 1980s American (The Castro in San Francisco, Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Virginia, Sun City Center in Florida, and Rajneeshpuram, Oregon), Frances Fitzgerald writes, Sydney Mead, the great authority on the American Protestant tradition, wrote in The …
When I was a small boy, and television sets were small, too, there was a Saturday-morning kids’ show that featured an animated creature called Winkie or Twinkie. The only thing that I remember about this show is that, at each episode’s end, a clue to the next one was cryptically delivered in a series of …
Continue reading ‘Forbidden Notebook
by Alba de Céspedes
translated by Ann Goldstein’ »
This is a difficult entry to begin, because I feel obliged to explain why I haven’t read Thomas Mann’s the first of Thomas Mann’s three classic novels before the tender age of seventy-six. If it had simply been a case of not getting around to something, that would be one thing, But as a rule …
In the March 18, 2024 issue of The New Yorker, Emma Green writes about so-called “classical schools,” a swelling trend in Anglophone education (“Old School“). These schools appear to be the latest exponents of the the long, somewhat rearguard campaign to unseat the “progressive” thinking of John Dewey, which can be caricatured as putting a …
For a few years now, I have been working my way backwards through the oeuvre of one of the two great but now forgotten midcentury American authors, James Gould Cozzens. The other is John P Marquand, whose novels I’ve been reading in no particular order. What I admire about both writers is the match between …
Continue reading ‘Men and Brethren
by James Gould Cozzens’ »