In the mid-1950s, John Hancock insurance ran full-page magazine advertisements featuring famous people from history. In 1955 one of those ads focused on Francis Parkman. “He brightened the dim record of our past,” the ad began but conceded that “a lot of people today don’t know about” him, although they ought to, since “there is so [...]
As George F. Will turns eighty, it bears noting that just as Whig writers in the eighteenth century learned their craft by studying the essays of Joseph Addison, so, too, have American conservative writers honed their writing skills by reading the columns of George Will. While Will’s authorial elegance and insight have been influences on many [...]
Beginning in the 1980s, apparently starting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and then extending to dozens of cities, appeared unusual graffiti, Toynbee Tiles. A kind of mosaic, these so-called tiles tend to be bits of linoleum embedded in the asphalt of a city street. While the creator of the tiles remains unknown, the text of each tile always [...]
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 [...]
