Likewise, Lionel Trilling convincingly asserted that “it can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.” Vladimir Nabokov, with typical fastidiousness, squabbled that s
Making a meal of Maggie: the PM's dinner included guests such as Tom Stoppard, Al Alvarez and Isaiah Berlin. Illustration: Ben Jennings for the Observer O n a clear autumn night in 1982, a government
I was leafing through some FBI files on French philosophers when a new candidate for occupancy of the populous Grassy Knoll in Dallas leapt out at me. To the massed ranks of the CIA, the Mafia, the KG
What if the poetic has left the poem in the same way that Elvis has left the building? Long after the limo pulled away, the audience was still in the arena screaming for more, but poetry escaped out t
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Cody Wilson is a twenty-five-year-old former law student at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the inventor of the Liberator, a gun made almost entirely from plastic pieces created with a 3
"The chicest thing," said fashion designer Phoebe Philo recently, "is when you don't exist on Google. God, I would love to be that person!" Philo, creative director of Céline, is not that person. As t
Letters, 1941–1985 by Italo Calvino, selected and with an introduction by Michael Wood and translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin Dominique Nabokov Italo Calvino, New York City, 1983 If you
This is a metaphor. Photograph: Getty Images An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old…
The VLF Story A LISTENER'S STORY ABOUT ELF/VLF "NATURAL RADIO"EMISSIONS OF EARTH IN THE 0.1 TO 10 kHz FREQUENCIES (The natural-radio "Audio-Band"). By Stephen P. McGreevy - (Early 1995 with Revisions
By Dennis Baron There’s a federal law that defines writing. Because the meaning of the words in our laws isn’t always clear, the very first of our federal laws, the Dictionary Act–the name for Title 1
How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with Microsoft producing good software at lower prices than its competitors, or ‘exploiting’ its workers more success
W ho are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of
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