Writing About Small Things

Chekhov says somewhere that a writer—a real writer, that is—ought to be able to write a story about anything, an ashtray for example. Actually, I don’t think that that would be so difficult a task: Ashtrays in the old days would have witnessed quite a lot, if they had been sentient and observant. And then, of course, cigarette ends might have ...


The Kindness of Strangers

It is nearly Christmas—or what Google, with its acute sensitivity toward Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Druze, pagans, animists, atheists, agnostics, and others, calls the holiday season—and so, contrary to my natural ...

Shamrock I and II by William Fife

The Late, Great American Anglo

“At home, ere I sailed o’er the billowy brine, A large and a liberal outlook was mine, The faults of the Briton Appeared to be written In letters remarkably fine. —Punch, “Caelum, non animum,” Sept. 26, 1906 During the summer ...

The Penny Black, Great Britain, 1840

Stamp of Approval

Every month when I am in England, I have lunch with an old friend in a restaurant about equidistant from our two homes, that is to say about fifty miles from each. The food is good, but I have a secret and rather peculiar additional ...

Nimes Station

The Humdrum Hotel

My wife and I lingered too long over lunch and missed our train from Nîmes to Paris; not by very much, not by more than thirty seconds in fact, but here really was an illustration of that old saw, that a miss is as good as a mile. How ...

The Arc de Triomphe’s New Clothes

I have noticed that, in all the acres of commentary (most of it respectful or even laudatory) on the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris with 25,000 square meters of polypropylene fabric, none has claimed that the beauty of the ...

Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis

Whatever Happened to the “Man of the Right”?

“My goal is to save the public soul by first punching it in the face.” —Ezra Pound The main failure of the rise of the conservative right in America has been its fear of producing its own brand of cultural elitist in the style ...

Parthenon, Athens

Permanent Statues

I write this under an Attic sun reflecting from the marbles of the Acropolis and into my living room. This was once the center of Western civilization, its stem just hundreds of feet from where I’m standing. Individual liberty and ...

Old Remedies for the New Age

While the great powers compete to invent the first vaccine against the new plague (there is more rivalry than in the boring space race for the first settler on Mars), making massive trials on human guinea pigs, I pay attention to good ...


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