By Mark Mix
Home day care providers would be forced into unions
The third volume of T.S. Eliot's letters shows the poet and critic in a period of transition. Readers of the unauthorized biographies by Lyndall Gordon and Peter Ackroyd tend to think of Eliot as either the effete Francophile of "Prufrock and Other Observations" or the austere self-professed "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion" who wrote "Ash-Wednesday."
Jacques Barzun, a pioneering cultural historian, reigning public intellectual and longtime Ivy League professor who became a best-selling author in his 90s with the acclaimed "From Dawn to Decadence," has died. He was 104.
Jacques Barzun, a pioneering cultural historian, reigning public intellectual and longtime Ivy League professor who became a best-selling author in his 90s with the acclaimed "From Dawn to Decadence," has died. He was 104.
Michael Frayn is a very funny writer. I remember almost literally falling off my chair with laughter when I saw "Noises Off " in London years ago, and his farceur's wizardry with plotting has not abandoned him. Time was, however, when plot meant something with a beginning, a middle and an end, but Mr. Frayn now appears to be adopting Ezra Pound's modernist modification of Aristotle's rule to "beginning, whoop, and then any kind of a tail-off."
An arresting moment occurs 20 pages into Paula McLain's novel "The Paris Wife," a book that is making its way up several best-seller lists. The narrator, Hadley Richardson, recounts "the cold morning in February when a single shot rang through the house. My mother heard it first and snapped awake, knowing instantly what had happened."
Critic, scholar, memoirist, satirist and all-purpose public intellectual, H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) was known, sometimes less than admiringly, as the Sage of Baltimore.
THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS: 50 YEARS REPORTING
