Anecdotal Evidence

A thought that never occurred to me but feels self-evidently right: “In the course of a reading life, one often stumbles on excellent prose writers never before encountered; such discoveries, however, are less likely in …

“[Robert Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved their vocation by playing the games with language and perception that poets play, three Musketeers at a time when not much else …

A reader asks if I have any heroes. “I’m guessing Samuel Johnson is one,” she writes, and that’s correct. “I think people are too cynical to have heroes today,” she continues. “They’re embarrassed to say …