On the life and works of the master humorist.

These stories are all about unsupervised children.

Both Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas speak of the debts of gratitude we owe to others — to God, to our parents, to our city or nation — anyone from whom we receive benefits.

According to Hazlitt, if we wish to know the force of human genius, we have only to read Shakespeare, but if we wish to know the futility of human learning, we have only to read his commentators.

I have another friend who thanks me to this day for introducing him to Sigrid Undset.

I have in my study a silver vase holding four peacock plumes and several parrot feathers. 

The scene is the Basilica of Saint Mark, in Milan, in 1874. 

Montaigne's reflections are a call to honest and sometimes painful self-examination. 

I believe that Tolkien found in the Middle Ages something of what another Catholic novelist, Sigrid Undset, found there.

If J.R.R. Tolkien was a Titan, Christopher was Atlas, with the weight of a cosmology on his back.