Prufrock: The MFA Sham, 'Silent Night' at 200, and Dickens in Washington

Danny Heitman writes about Charles Dickens’s 1842 trip to Washington that “left the novelist profoundly unhappy with America and its capital.”

Muriel Spark’s faith: “Spark explained that ‘the Roman Catholic faith corresponded to what I had always felt and known and believed; there was no blinding revelation in my case.’ The conversion marked an artistic as well as a spiritual turning point. She said that after becoming Catholic, ‘I began to see life as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings. I think it was this combination of circumstances which made it possible for me to attempt my first novel.’”