In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of their close relationship, which does not seem to have undermined either woman’s marriage,...

The particular myth that’s been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a...

The intellectual context in which Eliot began work on the “long poem” that was to become The Waste Land has much to tell us about formal aspects of his poem. Certainly it reveals something of...

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you...

The Renaissance did not break completely with mediaeval history and values. Sir Philip Sidney is often considered the model of the perfect Renaissance gentleman. He embodied the mediaeval virtues of the knight (the noble warrior),...

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code … a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.”(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)