Francis Crick winged into the Eagle, a pub popular with researchers at Cambridge University’s nearby Cavendish Laboratory, boasting to one and all, “We have found the secret of life.” It was early in 1953, and the “we” referred to thirty...
I began reading Carol Shields’ books many years ago, with The Box Garden. In that novel there’s a passage that made me laugh so hard I thought I would do myself an injury. It’s the chapter describing a mother with scant taste but a lot of...
Once upon a time, a French academic domiciled in the United States thought it would be a good idea to mark the opening of his university’s newly instituted Humanities Center by holding a conference on Structuralism, the philosophic system...
Historians looking back at the tragic events of September 11 will discover the roots of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon originating in three episodes that occurred in 1979. The first event was the Iranian...
Grant Webster provides a detailed account of the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals; and he supplements these central sections of his book by analyzing the nature of critical schools and by supplying an excellent bibliography and...
There were a dozen of them in the tiny, crowded space, loud with talk and typewriters, and they were busy getting out the little eight-page daily that gave them their chance to live in Paris in the Nineteen Twenties.
The warriors of Xi’an stood in darkness for 2,000 years, watching over their dead emperor. He was Qin, pronounced Chin, whose successors built the Great Wall and gave a name to China. The warriors are ranked in battalions, archers, cavalry...
