William Blake (1757-1827), little known in his lifetime, is now considered one of the leading lights of Romantic Age painting, art and poetry.  He was also a visionary. And, by [...]

The narrator of Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat tells in the book’s opening pages of finding a “Tartar” thistle in a recently mown field — terribly tough, coarse and gaudily red [...]

At the end of 2023, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life was prominent on many best-of-the-year lists, but not on mine. This may be evidence of my wrong-headedness.  Still, I can’t [...]

(1) Twice in his preface to How Fiction Works, James Wood quotes the novelist Ford Madox Ford. In the first instance, Wood, citing Virginia Woolf, notes that the creation of [...]

More than 1,600 years ago, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, wrote his Confessions, and it’s been a book with staying power. Indeed, as measured by its friends and enemies, the book [...]

Augustine of Hippo, the hugely influential philosopher and theologian of the late 400s and early 500s, was, according to Garry Wills, “a tireless seeker, never satisfied.” In Saint Augustine, his [...]

There are several running gags that Elmore Leonard has woven through his 2004 novel Mr. Paradise, one of them having to do with the dismemberment of the body of one [...]

I suspect that Joseph Conrad’s short 1917 novel The Shadow-Line, a Confession would have a difficult time finding a publisher today. Let me amend that:  Yes, the head of some [...]

It was one of those encounters that one has in an art museum.  On a day in which I looked at hundreds of paintings and sculptures at the Uffizi Museum [...]