In the 1820s, Washington Irving was credited with inspiring the romantic revival of Christmas in America. His Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman relayed sentimental tales of the British holiday…
Years ago cellist Steven Isserlis set out on a quest, a quest to discover how performing all five Beethoven sonatas in sequence would work. He first asked…
Mortimer Adler: The Paideia Way of Classical Education. Robert Woods. Classical Academic Press, 2019. It all comes down to wisdom really. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says,…
Shakespeare of London. Marchette Chute. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1949. It was a classic when it was first published in 1949, but it remains…
Storytelling shaped Washington Irving and his life as much as he shaped it. Irving describes how from boyhood he rambled about the countryside and “made myself familiar…
In the 1820s, Washington Irving was credited with inspiring the romantic revival of Christmas in America. His Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman relayed sentimental tales of the British…
Huckleberry Finn is no hero, though he is clearly a child on the cusp of adulthood. That perhaps is one reason I enjoy reading and teaching Mark…
When we think of love sonnets, most of us think of the sappy ooze of lyricists or the sometimes flavorless mush in cheap greeting cards. When they…
John of Salisbury not only depicts the thorough and balanced measure of the education of the ideal scholar, but he also points to the deficits within our…
In Virgil’s Aeneid, the strongest and most admirable characters like Aeneas and Turnus are seen as ideals of patriotism and courage. At times though, their stories are…
Using the framework of a subjective narrator, F. Scott Fitzgerald created an unconventional protagonist in the form of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. To Nick Carraway,…
In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway portrays the character of Frederic Henry as a hedonist, a young man who has always been indulged but is trapped…
Imagine a smoking cauldron rising from the trapdoor of the Globe’s center stage as you hear echoes of thunder from the attics. Three bearded men cloaked in…