Seventy years ago, an annual Christmas tradition began, a one-act opera in English, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. Less well-known is Menotti’s opera from three Decembers later, a three-act parable suitable also for Easter, The Saint of Bleecker Street. Its plot is simple: Annina, a young woman in New York City’s neighborhood of [...]
Three of the four Gospels tell us that right after John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the desert for forty days of testing by Satan. It seems a far cry from what one might expect from a hand-clapping, alleluia-shouting inspirer like the Holy Spirit: upon the heels of a joyous [...]
A leaden sky shielded London from the winter sun as I kept my appointment with Casper Gutman Antiques. Still in business after more than a century, it sits tucked away on one of those dead-end side streets not far from the Diogenes Club. With their customary courtesy they were letting me consult their founder’s private collection [...]
In several of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, trains figure prominently. They can play menacing roles, such as in The Thirty-nine Steps (1935) or Shadow of a Doubt (1943), but in two in particular, Strangers on a Train (1951) and North by Northwest (1959), significant scenes occur in a train’s dining car. David Lehman, writing in the April/May, [...]
Psychologists might be best placed to discern why some people seem to derive a pornographic delight in imagining their own generation is the worst of times and is witnessing the End of Civilization. With that self-absorption goes a grandiose fantasy that among the ruins, they will be with the few who emerge to rescue what little [...]
Historians tend to have fun in ways unlike most other people, so a game using a map and set in the past ought to be just what any historian would be after. Diplomacy, a board game commercially introduced in 1959 by Allan Calhamer, harkens back to the era of the First World War and forgoes a [...]
The year 1943 saw the publication of two American books about liberty. Both books sold well at the time and are still in print, and two books could not be more different. Both The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, and Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes, are novels describing struggles for freedom. Only one reflects a moral compass [...]
“He is known in the trade as an idea writer,” explained Raymond Chandler to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, in February, 1943, “liking the tour de force, and not much of a character man,” and Chandler added, “I think his stuff is very readable, but leaves no warmth behind it.” Chandler was referring to Cornell Woolrich, [...]
With the Declaration of Independence celebrating more than 240 years, a national treasure turns forty. McGruff the Crime Dog first appeared in July, 1980, and he has become an enduring part of American culture. He stands as a symbol of the Declaration’s commitment to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the Constitution’s dedication to [...]
Seventy-five years ago, a short novel charmed readers and became popular enough to get made two years later into a major Hollywood film. Twenty-one years after the film’s moderate success, the story became a weekly half-hour television show, lasting two years. Along the way, most people seem to have forgotten the book, by R. A. Dick [...]
