One Eternal Day

From a 1971 W.H. Auden letter critical of liturgical reform : As for the Psalms, they are poems, and to 'get' poetry, it should,...

W.H. Auden observed that many mystery fans "have no interest in other “genre” stories—romances, Westerns, science fiction, fantasy....

From a long, very interesting, essay by Katherine Rundell, herself an author of books for children, "Why children’s books?" : .......

Patrick Kurp likes Hamlet least of Shakespeare’s major plays: Of Shakespeare’s major plays, Hamlet is easily my least favorite, largely be...

Andrew Wilson : A few years ago I noticed how many of my favourite authors were writing during or immediately after World War II. .... ...

Alan Jacobs has been reading Right Ho, Jeeves . At Snakes & Ladders today he quotes W.H. Auden on Bertie Wooster : If [Bertie] has...

Alan Jacobs' newsletter, this morning, had a link to this description of an encounter with W.H. Auden : Auden had a cracked and wrin...

From "Why T.S. Eliot still matters" by Douglas Murray: I remember the exact words with which I was first introduced to “The...

W.H. Auden on the abandonment of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer by American Episcopalians (the 1928 Prayer Book was replaced in 1979, but...

From a 1971 W.H. Auden letter critical of liturgical reform : As for the Psalms, they are poems, and to 'get' poetry, it should,...

From "Why Christians Should Read Detective Fiction" : .... In his long essay “The Guilty Vicarage,” W.H. Auden, a self-conf...

From a review of the final two volumes of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden : ...[I]n 1940, watching a German film on the invasion o...

Coming in August and already pre-ordered. I find anything by Jacobs invariably interesting and this one is about both a time in which and s...

Originally posted in 2006: "How in blazes do you know all these horrors?" cried Flambeau. The shadow of a smile crossed the ...

W.H. Auden at the conclusion of his essay, "The Quest Hero" (1962): "And so they lived happily ever after" is a c...

In a good essay about the appeal of murder mysteries Alan Jacobs reflects on his enjoyment of such television series as Inspector Morse a...

From C.S. Lewis's 1954 Time and Tide review of The Fellowship of the Ring : .... Probably no book yet written in the world is qui...

Patrick Kurp, in "The Daily Texture of Our Lives," refers to Anthony Hecht's observation that W.H. Auden had a “remarkable r...

From the Telegraph obituary for P D James, perhaps the best mystery novelist of my time and certainly one of my favorites: For most ...

From "Detective Stories, Democracy, and Rule of Law" by Allan Griffith: In his classic book on Golden Age mysteries, Murder...