Brush Up Your Fowler
"A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" a hundred years on.
Articles by Joseph Epstein
First in War
Exempli Gratia
Peace Through Strength
Lingua Americana
American English is the music accompanying the great American circus.
Lend Me Your Ears
Rome's cultural efflorescence.
You Could Look It Up
A well-made index can be a great aid helping us “arrive swiftly but unruffled at the passage—the quotation, the datum, the knowledge—we need.”
Plutarch Without Parallel
The ancient world’s first man of letters.
David Hume and the Philosophical Life
Detachment was in his DNA.
The Moses of His Day
How Theodor Herzl became the unlikely father of Zionism.
War for the West
What if the Persians had defeated the Greeks?
A Philosophe in Full
Denis Diderot's Enlightenment.
The Menace of Political Correctness
The Good Intentions Paving Company strikes again.
Ruined by His Own Glory
The twists and turns of Alcibiades' life.
The Music of the Grand American Show
Reading H.L. Mencken’s The American Language.
Hail, Mommsen
A German historian's tribute to Rome.
Frivolous, Empty, and Perfectly Delightful
P.G. Wodehouse's world.
How to Talk Like a Politician
American political rhetoric's decline.
University of Chicago Days
Knowledge is good.
White Mischief
A portrait of the author as a young man.
A Thinker, I Suppose
Does Isaiah Berlin still matter?
From Tom to T.S.
A review of Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land, by Robert Crawford.
As American as Humble Pie
Joseph Epstein reviews David Bobb's new book on humility.
My Fair Language
A review of The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, by Henry Hitchings
Against the Virtual Life
A review of Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto, by Mark Helprin