Stanley Kubrick’s face in the clouds and other secrets of The Shining

I still miss Laurie Colwin.

Christmas, 1992. We ate a spiced beef roast that I had cured with juniper, allspice and salt for two weeks and a Country Christmas Cake, a heavy, dark fruitcake swathed in marzipan that had been aging since October. I’m sure they were wonderful, but I can’t quite remember how…

The exquisite animal drawings of Gabrielle Vincent

In Les Miserables, it took Victor Hugo 1400 pages and Lord knows how many words to tell his story of cruelty, suffering, endurance, and redemption. A Day, a Dog (1999), created by Gabrielle Vincent, accomplishes the same thing in 60 wordless…

A book of perfume criticism? And why not?

Just as music is art for the ear and painting is art for the eye, perfume is art for…

If you think you’re allergic to folk music, here’s the cure.

Friends of Old Time Music: The Folk Arrival 1961–1965 (Smithsonian Folkways). This three-disc anthology of live recordings contains some of the most powerful, soulful music ever made with or without benefit of amplifiers…

An enchanting Odyssey in graphic form

Reading Homer’s Odyssey is something I do once or twice a year. I have taught Homer’s classic…

In 1997, the American Film Institute released a list of the 100 greatest American films. The Searchers ranked 96th. This was a scandal.

It is the greatest John Wayne movie, and the greatest Western ever, which means, necessarily, that…

“It’s a good thing she’s dead.”

It was my friend Nora on the phone. Not hello, Penelope, this is Nora, how are you? Just “It’s a good thing she’s dead, or I’d kill her.”

I’d bugged Nora to read the Lymond Chronicles, raving that it was the most intense reading experience of my…

I have never seen such a wonderful elephant.

I can’t stop looking at the photograph on the cover of A Shadow Falls (2009), the…

When I was growing up in northern New England, I used to try wild apples.