Twice, King Lear says, “Nothing will come from nothing.” It is one of the most striking of the many striking lines in William Shakespeare’s masterpiece King Lear. Harold [...]
Donald Trump looms over Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics like one of the Bard’s ghosts, unavoidable, untouched, a dark dream of dread too fearsome to face. In his [...]
There is much about Joseph Campbell’s 1948 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that I find problematic. Campbell displays amazing erudition in this book and a vast [...]
After 768 pages of text and more than 350,000 words, the reader of Robert A. Caro’s The Path to Power might easily come away wondering: “Well, who was Lyndon [...]
The high point of Terry Pratchett’s eighth Discworld novel Guards! Guards!, published in 1989, comes when Carrot Ironfoundersson, the six-foot-six-inch dwarf and probationary member of the Ankh-Morpork Watch, arrests [...]
Among the many distinctive characters in David Copperfield, I have a soft spot in my heart for Jane Murdstone. Actually, that’s wrong. It’s not so much a soft spot [...]
Twice in her 2010 book The Christ of the Miracle Stories, Wendy Cotter tells this story about the Roman emperor Hadrian: He was on a journey, and a woman [...]
The Mouse that Roared, a comic, satirical, even silly novel by Leonard Wibberley, was published in 1955, a decade after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to [...]
Much of Agatha Christie 1923 mystery Murder on the Links seems, nearly a century after its publication, pretty hokey. There is a drawing-room, stage-set feel to its scenes, and Christie’s [...]
Over the years, I’ve read a fair number of books about death, but I found Sallie Tisdale’s Advice for Future Corpses so rich and powerful that, by the time [...]
