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Aristocratic Life in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (1917)

According to my grandfather, Serge Obolensky, and contrary to popular belief, aristocratic life in Russia under the Czar was not a life of luxury. One sees photographs of the aristocracy in jewels and...

People

The Woman of the Snow: Alexandra David-Néel

“Suffering raises up those souls that are truly great; it is only small souls that are made mean-spirited by it.”

Writing

More, or Less

Sometimes when we write, we have to cut out the bits that don’t forward the story. This is editing.

Writing

The Middle

Part of the novel-writing process, at least for me, is sporadic periods of angst, irritability, and rampant self-doubt that starts when I reach the middle. Often, these come late at night, like bad dr...

Writing

Three Books

At the end of H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine, the protagonist returns to the current world, recounts his story, and leaves, taking three books with him into the future or the past. The question “w...

People

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Robert Burton (1577-1640) was an English scholar at Oxford who wrote one of the most successful books of all time, called The Anatomy of Melancholy. How successful was it? From its first printing in 1...