Category: Issue 13

A few minutes into a screening of The Favourite (2018), my partner half turned to me in the theater and whispered, transfixed, “What have you taken me to?” I would hazard that a lot of people encountered the film similarly; from its earliest moments, it feels unfamiliar. There are a lot of reasons for this, […]

After my second vaccination in 2021, dreams of life after COVID-19 began to find a foothold. First on my list: in-person conversation. Of course, in this I am not alone. Presumably most if not all of the planet’s extroverts, and many of its introverts, are sick of talking at screens small and large; we long […]

Those of us who study the long eighteenth century sometimes jokingly suggest that it has never ended. It is no surprise, then, that many of us view the current climate of disinformation through the lenses of the eighteenth-century texts we know so well. For example, in a previous issue of this publication, Alex Creighton writes […]

In the middle of Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy’s edited collection On Essays is a typo so felicitous, so pleasurable, that it must have been intentional—if not by the author, then by the editors or the proofreaders. Petrarch once described one of his miscellanies as a text in which “multa familiariter deque rebus familiaribus scripta erant”: there […]

This year I hope to learn diligence. Often, at the start of a semester, I transcribe a line by Samuel Johnson. More aptly, I appropriate one of his goals. According to his friend, James Boswell, during the year that Johnson wrote a popular series of essays (The Idler), “in his private memorandums…we find ‘This year […]

Paul Hunter’s work, a mighty store and true Leaves plenty for we lesser souls to rue: That we might ne’er so far nor clearly see Across the troubled shoals of prosody, Nor nevermore such fortune will we find As when we met that all-consuming mind; And, as th’initiate’s erring foot is bent Towards that sage’s […]