“But you’re making progress, showing the youngsters a thing or two.” “It feels like the end of a long song, though — men like Cafferty and Joe Stark . . . and me too, come to that . . . we’re on our last legs. Our way of doing things seems . . . I […]

“The kind of man I am is not a suitable topic, you know. It’s not what one talks about.” “Why?” “Because it’s not.” “The code? A man doesn’t succumb to self-analysis? It’s weak? It’s womanish?” “It’s pointless. What I am is what I do. Finding the right words for it is no improvement. It isn’t […]

“Well, really, don’t you know.” Wimsey screwed his monocle more firmly into his eye. “Really, old fellow, you make me feel all of a doo-dah, what?” Do you have books you reach for when you’re feeling low, books you just know will cheer you up? For me, Have His Carcase is a sure thing when I need […]

Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever bet written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. We all probably know the Woody Allen joke about speed-reading War and […]

Our Souls at Night is the last of Kent Haruf’s Holt novels — he died not long before its publication. It seems fitting then, I suppose, that it is a bit bleaker than the other two I’ve read, a bit less optimistic about sustaining the kind of quiet humanity that it too holds out as our […]

As a doctor, I had had some sense of what patients with life-changing illnesses faced–and it was exactly these moments I had wanted to explore with them. Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it? […]

On university campuses we hear a lot about innovation these days, from hype about the latest ed-tech fad to proclamations by institutions like my own about fostering a “culture of innovation.” This has got me reflecting on how we define or recognize innovation — something that is not as obvious, I think, as its champions, […]

I’m so glad Emma Claire Sweeney put me on the list to receive a review copy of her new novel Owl Song at Dawn. A heartfelt story about love and acceptance, it is also an evocative look at a time and place — northern England in the 1950s — in which, for families like those Sweeney […]