When the rejections began rolling in, there was a universal theme. All the editors of the big publishing houses had…
“I have a theory, and the theory is mine,” says the pompous twit on the old Monty Python show, “which…
Nearly 60 years ago, the renowned prose stylist and infamous Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh passed away. On Easter Sunday (April…
In some sense, writing is guesswork. You put words on a page and hope people like them — generally, some…
How far Lord Minamoto no Muneyuki had fallen. His grandfather was the former Emperor Kōkō, and his father the Imperial…
In my last article, I described what I called ignorance to the third degree: ignorance that is proud of itself,…
On August 12, 2022, a 24-year-old California-born Islamist named Hadi Matar rushed the stage of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate…
When Philip Roth died in 2018 at age 85, all eyes turned to Blake Bailey, his appointed biographer who’d been…
