I am not an American,” Mark Twain once proclaimed, “I am the American.” He had good warrant for saying so. Of all the nation’s writers he is still considered the greatest – it’s not merely literary distinction but something even bigger than that. From Theodore Roosevelt onwards, American presidents have routinely salted their oratory with [...]
Read more >>>"The Stories of Ray Bradbury"—a 1,112-page Everyman's Library anthology to be published April 6, a few months ahead of its author's 90th birthday on Aug. 22—is filled with fictional wonders. Among them: time-travelers who take refuge from a fearful future in an anxious past; a children's playroom where the videotronic lions have real teeth; an [...]
Read more >>>When I began teaching in the early 1980s, I was only dimly aware that a revolution was taking place in how Shakespeare’s world and works were understood.
A decade earlier, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, I had been introduced to Shakespeare’s England through The Elizabethan World Picture (1943), EMW Tillyard’s slim and influential volume. We learned from Tillyard that English Renaissance culture was conservative [...]
Most Shakespeare experts have a lot to say about the conspiracy theorists who deny Shakespeare’s authorship of his own plays – but very little of it is printable, let alone as readable as James Shapiro’s Contested Will. Read more…
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Read more >>>In Sutton Courtenay churchyard about 10 miles south of Oxford, near the imposing tomb of H. H. Asquith, the prime minister 100 years ago, a much simpler gravestone reads “Eric Arthur Blair.” It was to that grave a friend and I recently made a pilgrimage for a sad anniversary. Blair died of tuberculosis on Jan. 21, 1950, at the age [...]
Read more >>>In 1907 Mark Twain, America’s best-loved living author, visited England in a blaze of glory. Among the fellow literary lights he met there were Rudyard Kipling, who described the camera shutters around Twain “click-clicking like gun locks,” and George Bernard Shaw. “He is in very much the same position as myself,” Shaw said of Twain. “He has to put matters in [...]
Read more >>>F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway met for the first time in 1925 in Paris, just as Fitzgerald’s third novel, “The Great Gatsby,” was being published in the United States. As recounted in the previous Second Reading, Hemingway was not a kind man and was especially unkind to Fitzgerald in “A Moveable Feast,” his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, but [...]
Read more >>>“Comic and supremely witty, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is both a satire of the academic world and a feast of philosophical and religious ideas.”—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams
“You do not have to perpetrate an act of faith to confront the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is faith [...]
For a long time, everyone has known that Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, the city where the modern was invented: the society of the spectacular. But everyone was wrong. The capital of the nineteenth century was London. Think about it. Walter Benjamin’s symbol of the Parisian modern was the arcade. The arcade! In London-according to the social campaigner [...]
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