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 [...]
Read more >>>How a 19th-century spinster serves as a moral compass in today’s world
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Read more >>>The Inimitable
A singular storyteller whose life informed an epic writing career
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Read more >>>In the political arena, the two nations have been bitter enemies since the 1960s, but a great writer’s enduring legacy has been uniting Cubans and Americans together in a peaceful and friendly endeavor.
Even 48 years after his death (in July 1961), Ernest Hemingway is doing more to improve the relations between the two countries than [...]
Summertime is sometimes equated with picking up a good book and losing yourself in another world; a bit of escape perhaps from the day-to-day rat race that is life. You may wish to delve into a classic, or you may be more interested in the newest thriller or romance novel. Whatever your fancy, the choices [...]
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