The soft pipes September 16, 2021 As a philosopher who writes about love, I am sometimes asked what I love. I could answer in particulars: specific people, places, and objects. Read More
French flowers in an English garden July 23, 2021 A summer walk through the garden of the English language reveals it sporting many a foreign flower. English has borrowed more words from French, in particular, than from any other modern foreign language. Read More
Émigrés: French Words That Turned English July 16, 2021 Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared. Read More
A look inside Eva Palmer Sikelianos June 15, 2021 I was myself introduced to Eva Palmer Sikelianos while leafing through books and magazines about Greece in my parents’ library in the 1960s and 1970s. Read More
Ivor Gurney: Writing in lockdown for fifteen years June 11, 2021 Contrary, perhaps, to expectation, few of us have produced great volumes of work in lockdown. Whilst many academics might previously have craved a moment out of time, for the world to stop and for them to have time to think, it doesn’t seem to have prompted the hoped-for avalanche of creativity. Read More
Listen in: Eva Palmer Sikelianos June 08, 2021 Listen to an audio sample from Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, a new book about the American actor, director, composer, and weaver best known for reviving the Delphic Festivals. Read More
After Callimachus: Poems May 19, 2021 Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. Read More
Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton April 27, 2021 John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Read More
“Say it came from Billie” April 26, 2021 Anyone who’s ever seen Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe)—dressed in a form-fitting black skirt, frilly overcoat, and flapper hat, carrying a fiddle in one hand and a small, boxy suitcase in the other—making her grand entrance at the Chicago train station in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) likely still has a relatively sharp memory of it intact. Read More
The paradoxical pleasures of reading literature April 21, 2021 Reading literature is a deeply dialectical experience, one that offers a variety of paradoxical pleasures. One of the most salient of these is that in reading well we both submit to the text and resist it. Read More
Crossing Medieval borders: Chaucer and Europe April 20, 2021 At the moment, almost no one is crossing borders. We aren’t allowed to travel, and many of us are separated from family, missing our international colleagues, and wishing we could go on holiday. Read More
After Callimachus Readings by Stephanie Burt April 19, 2021 Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. Read More
To discover that which was believed lost April 13, 2021 I thought it was gone. I thought it had left me or I had left it somewhere in the street, in a cabinet, inside the grocery store, at the gas station. The arguments were depleting, had become idiotic, fantasy. Read More
Nabokov: When playfulness is serious March 22, 2021 A rather common response to Nabokov has entailed complaints that he is altogether too cerebral or calculating a writer. Read More
Madame d’Aulnoy, the mysterious fairy‑tale queen March 17, 2021 For those readers who do not believe that fairies are real, they should think twice, for the extraordinary Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Comtesse d’Aulnoy (1650–1705) did not only invent the term fairy tale (conte de fees) and create tales about fairies, she was a fearless fairy herself. Read More
