There is an old adage that the summer vacation was a time for buildings to be empty, not the mind.   So, let salt air, sin, and the fate of civilization fire up the imagination over the coming weeks. Most readers expect that the tone and pace of a summer book should mark a shift from [...]

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.  They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn.  They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage [...]

“One more step, Mr. Hands,” said I, “and I’ll blow your brains out! Dead men don’t bite, you know,” I added, with a chuckle. You weren’t expecting Treasure Island, were you?   Well, we never are and that is part of its beauty. Here am I reader, on the coast of Maine. In trying to frame [...]

The arrival of a New Year invites reflection on a particular horror of human existence. A horror that was well exemplified by the ancient Romans who gave the passage into a new year to Janus, the god of gateways, who bore two faces—one facing forwards and the other backwards; looking both to the future and [...]

“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” In this one of his most famous lines, Robert Louis Stevenson presents us with a metaphor of the child as a king and the world as his vast domain.  This image of the child king [...]