It’s easy to misread this week’s New Yorker Magazine cover. At first glance it looks like a standard jibe at traditional religion and how conservatively women are dressed, but as always, on closer inspection, the artist is hinting at something else. It’s actually our own culture that hides something intimate, for all of our otherwise… Continue reading
Tom Piatek makes a good case for future editors of Christopher Hitchens to, um, fact-check his dashed off tomes.
It’s summer reading time and I remain pleasantly surprised by the pen of Robert E. Howard, as presented by Del Rey in their compilation of the complete Conan stories that Howard wrote in the 1930s. Howard was no literary genius, but compared to the hacks passed off in today’s sword and sorcery market, his prose… Continue reading
Scott Carson, on reading a review of a new book about the Greek soldier Xenophon and the eerie similarities of our current conflict with that of the ancient soldiers fighting pretty much right where our girls and boys are now: I was struck by this because anyone who reads The Wall Street Journal or The… Continue reading
Christopher Lee has just finished recording the audio book for The Children of Hurin. No surprise to anyone who loved the Tolkien books and the movies. He was almost the only member of the cast by the way, who not only pronounced all of Tolkien’s invented place-names etc properly, but clearly enjoyed it, too.