I met him when I was eleven or twelve, because one of his sons was in my class. He arrived in a Rolls Royce, talked affably in the...

I was amused and a little disturbed recently to stumble upon both a couple of life expectancy calculators (here's one) and a page on the...

Above: Edgar Degas and Jacques Louis David with competing erotic visions of the Spartans. Or Lacedaemonians. Rooting about in Thucydides,...

In the years leading up to the Second World War, Eric Ambler wrote some of the most influential thrillers ever published - more or less...

Today's quote of the day from The Browser - which I recommend to everyone - struck a cord for me. It's a commonplace in our culture to...

“Every morning I tell myself, Today has to be productive—and then something happens that prevents me from writing. Today . . . what is...

One of the most luminous, most humane intelligences in history was born two hundred years ago today: But the effect of her being on those...

Reading all the depressing news about plastic, which has now found its way to the bottom of the Marianas Trench – I’m reminded again of a...

Discovered recently among the manuscripts of that great English dramatist Willie A. Peakshamers: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...

I don’t think of myself as a glass fan, and little else here (or at Chihulymania in Seattle) does anything for me, aesthetically. But...

The brilliant old curmudgeon, Australia’s great Bard of Bunyah, is dead. I found his political, social and religious outlook by turns...

In this article in the Guardian on the subject of famous “Brutalist” buildings under threat from demolition, I note with interest and...

The characters’ motivations make so little sense that theories abound about missing or garbled text. And some of its faults would be easy...

Antony and Cleopatra in the Olivier at the National Theatre; a bracingly modern techno-thriller with executive suites, machine guns, and...

Philosophers are still reading Aristotle, and still arguing about whether there is free will: ergo, philosophy is useless. It has always...

I’m re-reading the critic James Wood’s excellent, readable little book of this title. Every writer should have a copy. There’s a superb...

Josef Beuys, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, and Keith Haring at the Broad Museum. Street art in East LA. And mariachi players in Mariachi...

Such brilliant titles! How can you not want to read a book called The Lathe of Heaven, or The Left Hand of Darkness? The stylistic and...

It’s all about the textures at the Seattle Art Museum’s brilliant 100th anniversary retrospective on Andrew Wyeth, an iconic American...

Helping out with a high school class on dystopian lit, I came across one of the best examples of the craft I’ve seen in a long time – the...