Is there a poem you know by heart? I hope so. When I was in seventh grade, I memorized Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” thinking it would come in handy later. Fifty years on, it hasn’t, at least in the way I originally thought it might. But it does […]
Last Monday my old friend Edward drove up from Connecticut and we took a road trip through Vermont with a couple of detours into New Hampshire. I met Edward at Uncle Veeny’s Farm in Tinkerille, New Hampshire, in 1970, so we had 43 years to reminisce about and reflect on. […]
As a person who worked in state government, in my case the New Hampshire Senate, I found there were many aspects of my job that were just too boring and complicated to explain to my friends. One of them was the Settlement Laws. Another was redistricting. No one is interested in […]
This video is shot in the theater at Groton School, where nearly fifty years ago I heard a South African clergyman — I can’t recall his name — explain the system of apartheid in that country. He summed it up neatly: “Apartheid = Apart, Hate.” About that same time, Temba […]
Those interested in the astonishing life of Alexander the Great will enjoy The Generalship of Alexander the Great by J. F. C. Fuller, a brilliant work of scholarship that draws on the many classical sources, as well as the author’s profound knowledge of military history. John Frederick Charles Fuller was a […]
Some years ago I was listening to the Albany Public Radio station, and they were discussing a biography of some historic notable in Albany’s history and speculating about whether he was a racist, and one of the panelists suggested that, no, he wasn’t a racist, he just attended ‘racist institutions’ like Groton […]
Many years ago I was visiting the Augustus St. Gaudens Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire, when I turned a corner and saw a sculpture of a shrouded figure, which I immediately recognized as Mrs. Henry Adams. I didn’t know that Henry Adams had commissioned St. Gaudens to sculpt a […]
I’m just back from a great conversation with my friend Catherine Styker about literature and the next generation during which I realized that the next generation will know nothing of the Brothers Karamazov, or Charles Dickens, or Shakespeare, or Homer, unless we act as a bridge to these great authors. […]
In the introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of his short stories published twenty years earlier in pulp detective magazines, the great Raymond Chandler asks why the popular mysteries of the time, despite their gaudy covers and trashy titles, had a kind of “authentic power” that made […]
