Because of Kipling, I’ve sometimes wondered about keeping a mongoose about the house. But given the cobra population in Silver Spring, Maryland – zero, when last I checked – we hardly need a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Michael Dirda Read Quote
Born in 1910, Wilfrid Thesiger spent his childhood in Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, as it was then called, where his father was an important and much-admired British official. Michael Dirda Read Quote
Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is ‘ghost story’ time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May. Michael Dirda Read Quote
Young people looking for adventure fiction now generally turn to fantasy, but for those of a certain age, the spy thriller has long been the escape reading of choice. Michael Dirda Read Quote
Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect that doing so would have violated the Parents’ Code. Michael Dirda Read Quote
In my own case, my folks didn’t actually object to comics, as many parents did, but they pretty much felt the things were a waste of time. Michael Dirda Read Quote
Reading books might itself be a bit weird, but obviously okay, since books were part of school, and doing well in school was clearly a good thing. But comics were more like candy, just flashy wrappers without any nourishment. Cheap thrills. Michael Dirda Read Quote
In 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs, having failed at everything else, decided to write a novel. He was then in his mid-thirties, married with two children, barely supporting his family as the agent for a pencil-sharpener business. Michael Dirda Read Quote
For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire. Michael Dirda Read Quote
Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn’t tends to consist of laments and cris du coeur over this, that, and the other. Michael Dirda Read Quote
