Wuthering
Expectations

The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was Dickens' fourth novel, and his fourth straight bestseller. It's reputation is not high now. Oscar...

Dr. Johnson advised a young James Boswell to visit Spain and write a book about it. Johnson thought it would make his reputation – there wer...

The Spanish Golden Age was an amazing literary period, a strong rival to the contemporary literature of England (that's right, including...

Sonnet 145 of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , "To Her Portrait": Este que ves, engaño colorido, que del arte ostentando los primores, ...

Sonnet 145 In which she attempts to refute the praises of a portrait of the poet, signed by truth, which she calls passion This thing you se...

Here's a hopeless task. Two, really. The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance (2005) is Edith Grossman's anthology of old ...

I'm too tired to write anything. I think I'll watch a movie instead (about 50 seconds, with music). Did you see that? It's like ...

When John Lloyd Stephens and his party arrived in the Yucatan in 1840, the peninsula was not exactly in rebellion, but had declared itself t...

John Lloyd Stephens (1805-52) was a professional travel writer, an early example of the breed, who wrote books about his trips to the Holy L...

On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History is a collection of lectures Thomas Carlyle gave in 1840, on the theory and practice of G...

Thomas Carlyle, at the beginning of the lectures titled On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (delivered 1840, published 1841)...

With any luck, I will be visiting Senegal this summer, as a tourist. I would like advice and recommendations for reading - novels, poems, no...

Last year many readers gnashed their teeth when they got to the epilogue of the last HP book, which the author used as a way to constrain p...

So the Campaign for the American Reader has a website called The Page 99 Test , which is headed by this quotation: "Open the book to ...

"Really, madam," said I, "you must be aware that every volume of a narrative turns less and less interesting as the author dr...

Nigel Bene has directed my attention to a list of the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels (pdf file) compiled by the American Book Review . It...

The NYRB edition of The Life of Henry Brulard - the old Penguin edition as well - ends with a separate 1840 document called "The Privi...

Here’s Stendhal writing about crossing the Alps behind Napoleon, and seeing Italy for the first time: “It was the hospice! There we were g...

Today, the strange features of the memoir of the childhood of Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal. From one of the numerous title pages: “ Life of Hen...

On the back cover of the NYRB edition of The Life of Henry Brulard (written 1835-6, published 1883), which is, oddly, an autobiographical w...