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The Trailblazing 18th-Century Woman of Letters Germaine de Staël on Ambition and the Crucial Difference Between Ego and Genius

The Trailblazing 18th-Century Woman of Letters Germaine de Staël on Ambition and the Crucial Difference Between Ego and Genius

“True glory cannot be obtained by relative celebrity.”

Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers

Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers

“It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all.”

Two Hundred Years of Blue

Two Hundred Years of Blue

Cerulean splendor from Goethe, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Rachel Carson, Toni Morrison, and other literary masters.

Nabokov’s Synesthetic Alphabet: From the Weathered Wood of A to the Thundercloud of Z

Nabokov’s Synesthetic Alphabet: From the Weathered Wood of A to the Thundercloud of Z

“The long A of the English alphabet… has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French A evokes polished ebony.”

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