• I don’t know anything about Canadian politics or the real significance of the newly-elected premier. But this piece by David Warren says some insightful things that are as applicable to our political culture as to our neighbor’s. Perhaps I should explain what I mean by “drivel.” I could write, “lies,” but these are only possible

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  • Hopkins ranked with Yeats among the poetic enthusiasms of my college years. This was in part the result of the influence of my roommate, who was a couple of years older than I, and of a teacher for whom we shared a great admiration. At the time it meant nothing to me that Hopkins was

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  • Chris Rea: Auberge

    More Chris Rea, who is very under-rated. I admit I don't really understand what this song is about. The artwork shown in this video is relevant in part because the album cover has one of the same artist's pictures, and also because in the full version of the title song there is a sort of

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  • When Craig Burrell wrote about Thomas Mann for Week 32 of the 52 Authors series, I decided that the next fiction I read would be Doctor Faustus. I had been irrationally prejudiced against Mann, somehow imagining his books to be very dull novels of not very interesting ideas. But Craig made him, and especially this book,

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  • In researching for this piece, I discovered that Louise Fitzhugh (1928-1974), the author of two of my favourite childhood books, was a lesbian. The two books, Harriet the Spy (1964) and its sequel, The Long Secret (1965) are peopled by strongly drawn eccentric characters. Few of the figures in her novels are simply ‘eccentrics’, but

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  • Leviathan

    Not Hobbes's book, but a recent movie from Russia, by director Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose name I would probably recognize if I were more knowledgeable about contemporary film-making. I only know about it because my late friend Robert recommended it. He described it as "a Bergmanesque masterpiece," and I regret that I didn't have a chance to

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  • In the late 1940s Mary Tew, an Oxford doctoral student in anthropology, was looking around for a suitable place to do fieldwork. These days that could mean anything (Kate Fox’s Watching the English is an entertaining example of turning an anthropologist’s eye on one’s native surroundings), but in the 1940s, in a European context, it

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  • Liszt: Totentanz

    19th Century metal.  

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  • I mentioned in the previous post on this topic that I had seen something somewhere comparing speeches made by Francis on his recent visit to some made by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Whatever it was I saw, I couldn’t find it again. So I compared speeches made by all three at the U.N.

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