Hello Dear Reader, It's inauguration time, so this is part 1 of 3 and we'll be talking the fall of the Roman empire.  I know these pages are usually devoted to fiction and novelists, and the subject ...

In this second part of three on the decline and fall of Rome, based on a reading of the Penguin Classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ( Abridged Edition, by Edward Gibbon, ed. David Womersley, 764 pages), we're talking primitive Christianity and Gibbon's take on how the pa

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In this second part of three on the decline and fall of Rome, based on a reading of the Penguin Classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ( Abridged Edition, by Edward Gibbon, e...

Hello Dear Reader, It's inauguration time, so this is part 1 of 3 and we'll be talking the fall of the Roman empire.  I know these pages are usually devoted to fiction and novelists, and the subject ...

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Lately, I've been thinking it's a very good thing we had Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe and Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and others to formulate both the Goth sensib...

The theme of the July newsletter is Pairings. I also want to recognize the importance of Juneteenth last month and the recent passing of the great Alice Munro, a story writer who can be credited with...

The subject this time is true crime. In keeping with my current reading list and my research reading for my own projects, this time I'm recommending Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone In The Dark (2018...