In their post this Monday about the death of the composer and librettist Michael Friedman, Lorin and Sadie Stein mentioned their surprise that Michael had published just a single piece on the Daily. “Over the years we’d talked about his doin…

Remember that time Henry James met Winston Churchill? The encounter took place in December, 1914, when Churchill was forty years old and James, his elder by three decades, was still a year from the stroke that would have him signing letters as Napole…

If there exists, as Susan Sontag once insisted, a “terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things,” nobody seems to have warned John Gruen. Born in France, in 1926, Gruen (né Jonas Grunberg) fled Hitler and then M…

“Art! Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’.” That’s one view, anyway, one that gained currency in Europe in the nineteenth century. But where does the defense of l’art pour l’art stand today? “Since art categorizable as ‘art f…

If your daily commute this past year was anything like mine, then your daily commute was nothing like Basil Bunting’s in 1965. That was the year Bunting composed Briggflatts, his magnum opus, while riding the train to and from his day job as a news…

Jenny Diski died yesterday. You might have discovered that fact if you happened to visit the London Review of Books, where Diski published essays, reviews, and blog posts for nearly twenty-five years. Or maybe, like me, you learned it on Twitter, whe…