Yearly Archive: 2017

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

4 Jan, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: This Way Up (4)

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With the Pasternak centenary in 1990 came several full-length biographies of the poet, and a discussion of their merits in the literary pages.  Reviewing Christopher Barnes’s Pasternak, Peter Levi, who has no Russian, startled readers of the Independent with the theory that “Doctor Zhivago was his masterpiece, but only a poet could have written it.”  “He has some Russian,” lied Peter France, who does not have enough Russian to know he was lying, reviewing Levi’s Pasternak in The Scotsman. Reviewing Levi’s Pasternak in the Observer, Anthony Burgess, who had expended what Russian he had ever had on A Clockwork Orange,...

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Fleming / On the House

4 Jan, 2017

The Xanthippe, Part 2

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Part II Xanthippe is saved by the noisy entrance of a semi-intoxicated young man . Xanthippe: “Why, it’s Pheidippides, that new student of yours at the Phrontisterion.  What does he want?  I hope he’s come to pay his bills.” Socrates:  You know I do  not charge for my instruction.  The sophists take money, because they claim to be able to teach their students how to succeed.  I only want my young friends to understand, and who would pay for that? Xanthippe:  Some of them, at least, bring me presents—good wine and oil for dressins greens, not that lamp oil you...

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

2 Jan, 2017

Travel Diary I: Through Mordor in a Taurus or Getting There is Not Half the Fun

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We set out on our unheroic journey on a cold Friday, December 30.  It is a thousand mile trip, from Northern Illinois to Sullivan’s Island, and, if one were to judge from what can be seen from the interstate highway system, there is not much in that thousand linear miles that cannot be reduced to a numerical grid of I-39, I-64, I-75, I-40, I-26 intersected by identical lodging, food, and gas opportunities. Entering into the grid is something like an adventure in dystopian time travel—an episode of Startrek, perhaps where Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and all the other noble agents of...