Don’t you hate it when foreigners say bad things about America? Like that Charles Dickens guy who came here in 1842. “This is not the republic I came to see,” he said. “This is not the republic of my imagination.” Like there was something wrong with America. In fact he […]

Here is a young English travel writer describing a train trip from Boston to Lowell in the year 1842: A great many newspapers are pulled out, and a few of them are read. Everybody talks to you, or to anybody else who hits his fancy. If you are an Englishman, […]

Everything I ever learned about chess I learned from my grandfather, Charles K. Dickson, who, so far as I know, never let me win, so that when I finally did win a game it really counted for something, and from the book I interited from him, Irving Chernev’s 1,000 Best […]

How do you think? That’s the question that comes up when you read George Simenon’s Maigret novels. Maigret is introduced to a new situation, asks a lot of questions and then — mulls over the entire situation. Simenon tells you all these minute details about Maigret’s life because without them […]

I remember back in the 70s if you gave one of Kurt Vonnegut’s books to someone, you generally found, when you visited them later, that they had gone out and gotten all the others. I gave my brother Rob a copy of a Tony Hillerman book years ago, and sure […]

I was reading about the gladiatorial spectacles held in Rome, and I was wondering if children were allowed to watch them. Of course they were! I found out by reading “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius — in a great translation by Robert Graves. At some point someone is wearing a […]

If I had to choose one book that has given me the most enjoyment, I would have to think, but not for too long. Irving Chernev’s 1,000 Best Short Games of Chess wins hands down. I have enjoyed this book immensely since I inherited a copy in 1973 from my […]

You can tell a lot about people by their sense of humor. George Bush the Younger thinks a condemned woman pleading for her life is funny. HAW HAW HAW Ronald Reagan thought nuclear war was funny — “We start bombing in five minutes.” HAW HAW HAW The Romans thought it […]

This poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins was sent in by a reader in Conway, New Hampshire. (Thanks Mum!) It was featured on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.” Ozymandias I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the […]

In a column in the New York Times, Abbas El-Zein, whose grandmother was killed fleeing the Israeli Army during the invasion in 1978, writes: “More is at stake now than the fate of Lebanon. If the West does not persuade Israel to stop its attacks, that failure will add to […]