Sometimes One Succeeds, Sometimes One Fails.

Rebecca Mead's My Life In Middlemarch Is A Wise, Humane, And Delightful Study Of What Some Regard As The Best Novel In English. Mead Has Discovered An Original And Highly Personal Way To Make Herself An Inhabitant Both Of The Book And Of George Eliot's Imaginary City. Though I Have Read And Taught The Book These Many Years I Find Myself Desiring To Go Back To It After Reading Rebecca Mead's Work.

What Is Supposed To Be The Very Essence Of Judaism - Which Is The Notion That It Is By Study That You Make Yourself A Holy People - Is Nowhere Present In Hebrew Tradition Before The End Of The First Or The Beginning Of The Second Century Of The Common Era.

Personality, In Our Sense, Is A Shakespearean Invention.

The Art And Passion Of Reading Well And Deeply Is Waning, But [jane] Austen Still Inspires People To Become Fanatical Readers.

We Read Not Only Because We Cannot Know Enough People, But Because Friendship Is So Vulnerable, So Likely To Diminish Or Disappear, Overcome By Space, Time, Imperfect Sympathies, And All The Sorrows Of Familial And Passional Life.