Have you ever bitten down too soon on a mint? I’m sure you have. You may recall the sound of the mint breaking like crunching glass in your head, giving way, if the mint was perhaps filled with chocolate, to a surprising softness as the shards of candy sink in to the centre under pressure.…

Through reading (and through the study of literature), we rehearse the great dilemmas of life, both personal and social. We find ourselves asking the big philosophical questions: How should I live? What is the good life? What is love? What is justice? And what does it all add up to? Literature is not philosophy, it’s…

Today is Robbie Burns day. Tomorrow I get my wisdom teeth pulled. Robbie, what do you think about that? Where’er that place be priests ca’ hell, Where a’ the tones o’ misery yell, An’ ranked plagues their numbers tell, In dreadfu’ raw, Thou, Toothache, surely bear’st the bell, Amang them a’! Yeah, thanks, Robbie. You…

It’s been noted, by myself and others, that I have the curious ability to remember just enough of almost everything I have ever read so as to appear that I remember everything ever written by everyone. This ability fails me now and again but I usually seem pretty smart. “Seem” is the key word. Anyway,…

Myron Magnet, editor of City Journal, doesn’t want you to wonder, “What use is Literature?” … [It] teaches us more about psychology than the psychologists can. The inner life—and its relation to the outer appearance, from which it is often (and proverbially) very different—is literature’s special subject. It is a particularly complex subject, with its…