A few years ago, I ran across Italo Calvino’s essay “Why Read the Classics?” The author has long been among my favorites, and I generally read anything of his I can find…

Concluding not too long ago, I wrote a series of articles commenting on Old Masters and Young Geniuses.¹ At the beginning, I was…

When I recently mentioned I typically read multiple books simultaneously, I almost said it was a bad habit; I almost apologized for it. But in fact, I’ve always…