Because of the critical commotion aroused by Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, I’m re-reading the Homer, a book a day, in Richmond Lattimore’s translation. The pleasure it brings is very great, not least because I’m an old man, and far less likely than I used to be to respond to the hero’s sufferings with …
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 is taking me a long time to understand the magnetic appeal that the British crime series, Vera has for me. I still remember the disappointment of watching the first episode, something I did in response to a friend’s raving enthusiasm. The show was so drab and dingy! The mother of one of the murder victims lived …
Paragraphs of four words are rare in the works of Jane Austen, and those without dialogue vanishingly few. I don’t mean to dilate on the elegant arrangement of the action in the final third of Emma, but I point to this singular instance (in Chapter 43) because it emphasizes what is to me the truly …
The Jacobean poet George Herbert once wrote a poem called “The Pulley,” in which he imagines the Creator’s thoughts about the endowment of mankind. “Having a glass of blessings standing by,” God proposes to pour in “all we can.” Strength, beauty, honor, wisdom and pleasure are all bestowed. The one blessing that remains in the …
As a natural journalist— a writer engaged by the connections between the phenomena of today and the long-term patterns of human insight and undertaking — I often wonder if I ought to regret never having been paid to do what comes naturally. Then I encounter the work of a professional and realize that this is …
Although I made the decision just last week, I can no longer recall why I ordered both the 1958 novella, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, by Paul Gallico and Anthony Fabian’s 2022 film adaptation thereof. I know that I bought the DVD because Lesley Manville appears in the title role, and I’m crazy about her. …
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The Princess of 72nd Street is a historical novel, first published in 1979 and very much of its time, which I remember as a period of open confusion. What followed may not have been much of an improvement for many people, but it was relatively straightforward, and things have only gotten more straightforward since; today, alas, …
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by Elaine Kraf’ »
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 …
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve re-read two novels about widows — and, for the first time, as a widower myself. One of them is probably more familiar as a film, starring Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend. The other happens to be the novel that ties for My Most Favorite with Jane Austen’s Emma. …