Reviews and News:
The five-foot-six Wilkie Collins wore bright pink and blue shirts, preferred foie gras to mutton, and thought marriage ruined friendships. He also loved the stage and wrote that his sensational novels treated “the secret theatre of home.”
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J. L. Carr’s works of fiction “are done with the care and fine sable brushes of the miniaturist.” As an editor of his own press, he specialized in “little pamphlets: quiddities of trivia, potted biographies of English kings and their consorts, poems and aphorisms from Tennyson, Keats and Carroll, miniature maps of English counties, and gossipy bits of nonsense about famous cricketers and cricketing hangers-on.” In all things, he was “ever on the side of the underdog.”
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Worried that shell shock would become an epidemic, British high command decided to mostly ignore it.
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Is OPEC dead?
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The value of the humanities: “We live in an age of skepticism about the value of the humanities. This skepticism grows out of a casual cost-benefit analysis: the sense that we as a society, and as parents, don’t get a decent return on our educational investments—and that the humanities really aren’t good for much. Colleges and universities are their own worst enemies in this calculus. They raise costs at rates that far outstrip inflation, and they hire faculty—especially in the humanities and social sciences—who seem dedicated to speaking mostly to each other, about things in which only a very small number of individuals could possibly feign interest. In his surprising new book Why We Need the Humanities: Life Science, Law and the Common Good, Donald Drakeman gives us reasons to embrace the humanities again.”
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C. E. Morgan’s second novel, The Sport of Kings, is “a world-encompassing colossus.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Brett Gamboa argues that any effort to “translate” Shakespeare into modern English “is doomed from inception; it’s not that in translation one loses the ‘gist’ of Shakespeare. It’s that one loses Shakespeare himself”:
“The trouble with making sense of fundamentally incomprehensible aspects of the plays is that it risks making those plays less than they are. It fixes what isn’t broken, delivering a set of generalized themes or meanings at the expense of confusion, instabilities, and reversals—the stuff on which drama is made. Human beings cannot choose but make all the sense they can of the language streaming at them from the stage, but our ongoing and always uncertain attempts to reconcile the contradictions, ellipses, and ambivalences of Shakespeare’s language and characters, and to extract unified sense from syntax that doesn’t deliver it can help create a dramatic experience of our own, sometimes one that puts audiences in a position eerily like that of the tragic protagonists before them. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear struggle to make sense of a world around them, and they do so in plays that are both celebrated and feared because they simulate that same struggle to understand in their audiences—but only if we allow them do so.”
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Image of the Day: Vineyard anti-frost candles
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Poem: Marjorie Maddox, “Parable”
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