Before joining in March, 1941, as a private in the United States Army Air Corps, James Stewart had made his name in Hollywood with several wholesome films, his name becoming a byword for the amiable and earnest young man who shows what is really important in life. After two years training stateside and then two years [...]
When someone asks where to begin reading G. K. Chesterton, it is like asking which door to go in along the Strand. For just as the Strand offers entry to the Savoy Hotel and Twining’s tea shop, King’s College London and Nicholson’s Coal Hole, so does Chesterton admit of any number of approaches. There is Chesterton [...]
The Strand Magazine has appeared with a previously unpublished short story, “It’s All Right—He Only Died,” by Raymond Chandler. Chandler (1888-1959) is best known for creating Philip Marlowe, a private detective in Los Angeles, California. Marlowe featured in seven novels, published between 1939 and 1953; an eighth novel was unfinished at Chandler’s death, his estate in [...]
Imagine a Roman Catholic priest, a Benedictine monk in his early sixties with a sense that he is not long for this world. He has visited one of his former students, a diocesan priest, recently settled into his post as bishop of a major city some seventy miles south of the monastery. Back home, the old [...]
Five images survive of Bishop Odo of Bayeux (c. 1030-1097), three occurring on the Bayeux Tapestry, two on his episcopal seal. To be precise, the seal itself has gone missing, but a nineteenth-century drawing of it survives. The first image on the Tapestry shows him giving the blessing at a chicken dinner; the second has him [...]
To the delight of philatelists and dismay of traditionalists, word was the Vatican’s post office would issue a stamp to commemorate Martin Luther and the 500th anniversary of his Ninety-five Theses. On that day in October, 1517, when he nailed up his now famous Theses, Luther began securing a place in history, but needless to say, [...]
A trend on various web sites is to use pseudonyms. It is a literary custom with a considerable pedigree: In the eighteenth century, for example, British and American newspaper essayists believed that they needed to use evocative pseudonyms drawn from classical antiquity, such as Cato or Publius, to shield themselves from political and legal recrimination. Those [...]
In three television films between 2004 and 2008, Bob Newhart played Judson, the director of an unusual urban library. The fictional Metropolitan Public Library contains secret chambers holding priceless artifacts, such as the Ark of the Covenant and King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. To carry on the work of the library, Judson hires a young scholar, a [...]
Supposedly people are drawn to fiction that fills a need in their lives, so that lonely women read romance novels, and, as Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey observed in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), “dull men in offices read detective stories.” Exceptions occur, so that men who have traveled a lot and who [...]
The first half of 2017 has seen the publication of books about growing up. They include: Mark Batterson, Play the Man: Becoming the Man God Created You to Be; William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed: Little Things that Can Change Your Life and Maybe the World; Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis and [...]
