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Donald Hall is a wonderful choice for US Poet Laureate. I’ve worked closely with him on such projects as “The Best American Poetry 1989,” and in 1994 he asked me to succeed him as general editor of the University of Michigan Press’s “Poets on Poetry” series. So I feel a special kinship with him. But […]
Continued from last week’s post: Boswell: Thursday, 2 September Johnson: Edinburgh We now returned to Edinburgh, where I passed some days with men of learning, whose names want no advancement from my commemoration, or with women of elegance, which perhaps disclaims a pedant’s praise. The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to […]
Darren Spedale and William Eskridge have been all over the media this week responding to the renewed push by President Bush and Senate Republicans for a Gay Marriage Amendment. Time.com blogger, Andrew Sullivan, made this quote from their new book (via an excerpt at the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy website) his ‘quote of […]
Continued from last week’s post: Boswell: Wednesday, 1 September Boswell: Thursday, 2 September. I had slept ill. Mr Johnson’s anger had affected me much. I considered that, without any bad intention, I might suddenly forfeit his friendship. I was impatient to see him this morning. I told him how uneasy he had made me by […]
By Jussi M. Hanhimäki American media has been exercised in the last week over “newly released” documents from Henry Kissinger’s archives that reveal his position on Vietnam. Specifically, reports have appeared on NBC news and on the pages of The New York Times about how Henry Kissinger told Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai in 1972 that […]
Continued from last week’s post: Boswell: Monday, 30 August 1773 Boswell: Wednesday, 1 September We came to a rich green valley, comparatively speaking, and stopped at Auchnashiel, a kind of rural village, a number of cottages being built together, as we saw all along in the Highlands. We passed many many miles today without seeing […]
By Rachel Bronson The United States and Saudi Arabia form one of the world’s most misunderstood partnerships. The Saudis are a longtime oil supplier for the U.S. economy but on 9/11 their kingdom accounted for 15 of the 19 hijackers. The Bush family and the House of Saud are close yet Secretary of State Condoleezza […]
Continued from last week’s post: Johnson: ‘Loch Ness’ Boswell: Monday, 30 August 1773 This day we were to begin our equitation, as I said, for I would needs make a word too. We might have taken a chaise to Fort Augustus. But we could not find horses after Inverness, so we resolved to begin here […]
A whirlwind week of prepping is over and BEA is finally here! So, we’re taking a blogging mini-break and just providing some links today. Here is the Washington Post’s BEA preview and and the AP’s which focusses on the politics of publishing’s schmoozefest. Here is today’s NYTimes review of The Da Vinci Code, which devotes […]
by Bart Ehrman The Da Vinci Code is a murder mystery set in modern times, but its intrigue for many people has been its historical claims about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. I won’t summarize the entire plot here, as it is familiar to nearly everyone—there are only six people in the English-speaking world who have […]
Continued from last week’s post: Johnson: ‘Inverness’ Johnson: ‘Loch Ness’ Near the way, by the water side, we espied a cottage. This was the first Highland hut that I had seen; and as our business was with life and manners, we were willing to visit it. To enter a habitation without leave seems to be […]
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775); James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1773; ed. F. A. Pottle, 1961) A young and enthusiastic James Boswell befriended Samuel Johnson (1709-84), England’s most famous man of letters, in London in 1763. Soon Boswell was urging […]
by John-Peter Pham Spurred on no doubt by The Da Vinci Code hoopla, Dan Brown’s fans continue to push his less intricately crafted Angels & Demons to the top of the bestseller lists. A “prequel” to The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons chronicles Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon’s first foray into the world of the […]
With the world-wide release of The DaVinci Code movie fast approaching, as a service to our readers, we post Bart Ehrman’s list of the 10 historical errors contained in the book. 1. Jesus’ life was decidedly not “recorded by thousands of followers across the land.” He didn’t even have thousands of followers, let alone literate […]
The discovery of the Gospel of Judas has created quite a stir at OUP. Bart Ehrman, whose book on Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene was just released, wrote significant sections for both of the best-selling books (1, 2) brought out by National Geographic on the subject. Now, Philip Jenkins has written an essay at Beliefnet […]
by Don Ritchie It is richly ironic that during the same week the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting was awarded to Susan Schmidt, James V. Grimaldi, and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post, for their coverage of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, news reports also revealed that the FBI has been seeking to comb […]