Writing

Danny Heitman on the slender volumes of Notting Hill Editions—treats for the mind.

Priscilla M. Jensen pays a visit to Miss Flannery.

Lionel Shriver does not want to write books in which people only say the right thing. She is pushing back against prudence.

Social media are full of people who, under the impression that their political fulminations are witty, spend much of their days collecting likes and retweets from the hordes of barking-seal partisans. And so it was that Yvonne Mason, a retired English teacher in South Carolina, wrote a letter…

Ever since Michel de Montaigne noted that he couldn’t be sure whether he was playing with his cat or his cat was playing with him, an essayist without a cat has seemed like a Hasid without a hat. Or so I came to conclude a month or so after our charming calico cat Hermione died one sad evening in…

In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, Henry Louis Mencken became not only one of America’s most memorable prose stylists, but also one of its most prolific ones.

The other day a friend told me that my name came up at the funeral of someone I didn’t remotely know. I told her, this friend, that I assumed that the person who brought it up was doubtless the minister, priest, or rabbi officiating at the funeral. She said it was the minister. I added that I knew…

Joe Hagan has written what promises to be the standard biography of Jann Wenner—standard, because it’s hard to imagine anyone working up the energy to take another stab at it. Fifty years ago, at the age of 21, Wenner founded Rolling Stone magazine, and he’s been editor in chief ever since. Thanks…

The occasion of Murray Kempton’s centenary​—​he was born December 16, 1917—​has attracted little attention. As a columnist for the New York Post and later Newsday he wrote more about New York than Washington or national politics, but one had a right to expect a biography or maybe a few essays or a…

There have been very few Renaissance men since the Renaissance—and they weren’t exactly thick on the ground even in their glory days. No modern figure is more worthy of that appellation than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who was not only the greatest German poet, playwright,…

We can speak of “settled law.” Not so with biography. The verdict is always out on appeal, and the subject accountable to more litigation. Discovery yields new evidence, and additional litigants take up the case. This is especially so with Ulysses S. Grant.

I recently saw a sportswriter on social media paying tribute to a deceased editor he’d had the pleasure of working with. “The best editors are a psychologist, a friend, an idea person, a life vest,” he wrote. “Every story written is a trust fall into an editor’s arms.” I don’t doubt this sentiment…

On November 2, 1917—a hundred years ago this week—the British government sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, declaring its “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and promising Britain’s support in “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

On November 2, 1917—a hundred years ago this week—the British government sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, declaring its “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and promising Britain’s support in “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. possessed the most sparkling intelligence of his generation of historians. He may not have had the most subtle or profound mind, but his was the most effervescent disposition, and no one could surpass him in sheer energy, knowledge, and skill as scholar and writer.…

Justice Scalia was a terrific writer. And he thought about the craft, and what it requires. A short speech titled “Writing Well,” given to a group of legal writers who were giving him a lifetime achievement award, is fantastic.

In recent years, John McPhee’s writing has become more retrospective, a natural sensibility for a man now 86 years old. A case in point was his 2010 book Silk Parachute, a collection of essays and reportage that also stood out for its uncharacteristically personal tone. From the title essay, a…

I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed reading a collection of speeches. This may be due to the fact that most or maybe all I’ve read are political, and political speeches, even those authored by literate and capable politicians, lose their significance almost immediately. But perhaps the more important…

 A friend sent me news that E. B. White’s saltwater farm on the coast of Maine is up for sale, and my mind leapt back nearly 20 years—an impressive leap for a mind in my condition—to a visit I’d made there to mark the 100th anniversary of White’s birth in 1899. I was on assignment for a magazine, a…

I like to think of myself as a writer-editor on call. If a metaphor needs rewiring or a talking-point has lost its pointiness, I am on it like butter on toast. But when a friend asked me to write an obituary for her mother, I wondered if I was really the man for the job. I didn’t know her mother…

Readers of the Washington Post op-ed page might be forgiven for believing that they're under assault—from adjectives, lots of adjectives. Consider, for example, these opening sentences from the three separate pieces spread across the top of the page this past Monday.

In the vivid and varied world of 19th-century British literature, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) endures as a striking footnote. He produced 250 essays published in 21 volumes, along with dabbling in fiction, yet is known today—to the extent he's known at all—for one book, an 1822 memoir of…

In the vivid and varied world of 19th-century British literature, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) endures as a striking footnote. He produced 250 essays published in 21 volumes, along with dabbling in fiction, yet is known today—to the extent he's known at all—for one book, an 1822 memoir of…

Thomas Sowell is giving up his column. I can think of lots of columnists whose writing we wouldn't miss. Sowell isn't one of them. Every column he wrote in a quarter-century career as a columnist was eminently worth reading. I say this having read nearly every one of them.

Occasionally a younger person will ask me for counsel on getting an essay published. Usually, I have two suggestions.

A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he's being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.

A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he’s being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.

Occasionally a younger person will ask me for counsel on getting an essay published. Usually, I have two suggestions.

I first acquired a connoisseur’s interest in dull headlines in 1963, when I read, in a note in the air edition of the English New Statesman, that the London Times had staged a contest for the dullest headline to appear in the paper over the past year. The winning entry was "Small Earthquake in…