For Lesley Blanch, travel writing offered a chance to explore her preconceptions about a place as much as the place itself.Every travel writer is a character in her own narrative, no less a part of the story than the “foreigners” that story depic…
Celebrity and oblivion in the Goncourt brothers.Few documents provide as comprehensive—or as caustic—a view of celebrity as the diary of the Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond. Chronicling literary Paris from 1851 to 1896, The Journal of the de Gonc…
Mansfield Park at two hundred. Poor Fanny Price. The unabashedly mousy, pathologically virtuous protagonist of Mansfield Park—which turns two hundred this year—is Jane Austen’s least popular heroine. She spends most of the novel creeping aro…
For the origins of the selfie, look to the dandy.When selfie was crowned the Word of 2013 by the Oxford Dictionaries, the media reaction ranged from apocalyptic to cautiously optimistic. For the Calgary Herald’s Andrew Cohen, “selfie culture” r…