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Originally posted on Dr. Doyle's Blog:
Way back in 1890, the Scottish poet, novelist, and literary critic Andrew Lang (best known in later years for his fairy-tale collections) gave a lecture at the South Kensington Museum, in aid of the College for Working Men and Women.  The title of the lecture was “How to…

Originally posted on Dr. Doyle's Blog:
As a tool for getting ideas out of one person’s head and into another’s, language (whether spoken or written) is a poor substitute for telepathy . . . but it’s the only tool we’ve got. It’s not surprising, then, that writers often have an ambiguous relationship with language.?…

Originally posted on Dr. Doyle's Blog:
Or, Robert Frost gets it right again. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…. Tree roots and the freeze-thaw cycle, to be specific. The freeze-thaw cycle is also responsible for frost heaves, which can give the roads up here a corrugated appearance in late winter and early…

Originally posted on Dr. Doyle's Blog:
It matters a lot, sometimes, what age you are when you first read a particular book.  Most of the time, though, the bit that matters isn’t whether or not you’re old enough for it.  Those of us who are members of the siblinghood of compulsive readers spend a…

Originally posted on Dr. Doyle's Blog:
I first encountered Wolcott Gibbs’s “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles” in James Thurber’s The Years With Ross, Thurber’s memoir of the early days of the New Yorker magazine. In many ways, it’s a relic of its moment in time (1937, to be precise); it was…