Exeter Excellence

It is an amazing time of year here at Phillips Exeter, not only because it is finally warm and sunny, but because of the end-of-year displays of student excellence. I have been privileged, over the past week, to see excellence from many students in many forms.  Evan Soltas, the most brilliant 18-year-old economist in America,…

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Third Pass

My friend Nick Trefethen, in his book Trefethen’s Index Cards, says that “before computers articles and books went through one or two or three drafts before publication.  Authors had to be skilled at envisioning how copy would look in print that was splattered with corrections and reorderings and insertions.  Nowadays, if the author is finicky,…

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Caro’s Johnson

I have reviewed Robert Caro’s new book on Lyndon Johnson for the Washington Independent Review of Books.  Link to the review is here: http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-passage-of-power-the-years-of-lyndon-johnson/ I realize that my criticisms of Caro’s footnotes may seem petty.  Ultimately, though, footnotes are what distinguish history from historical fiction, and Caro sometimes does not seem sufficiently concerned about that…

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William Howard Russell

William Howard Russell was already a famous war correspondent when he arrived in the United States in March 1861, intent on covering the imminent American civil war.  Russell traveled widely over the next year, leaving in April 1862, and then published in London in 1863 a book he entitled “My Diary North and South.”    The…

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Tarbell, Thomas and Burlingame

I am reading this morning a wonderful little book:  “Lincoln’s Humor” and Other Essays, by Benjamin Thomas.  It is a collection of essays by Thomas, one of the great Lincoln biographers, edited and published after his death by another great Lincoln biographer, Michael Burlingame. One of the essays deals with yet another Lincoln biographer:  Ida…

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Writer’s Quotation Book

One of the advantages of living in two places is that the pleasure of “coming home” to books in the “other place.”  We were in our Virginia home for a few days this month, and I found a number of books that I had not seen or read in years.  One of them, a particular…

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Seward and Wodehouse

I am reading the first set of Seward page proofs.  I am also re-reading, as I often do, P.G. Wodehouse. I recall once reading that, when he had a set of page proofs, Wodehouse would tack them to the wall around his room.  He would tack those which were great higher than those which were…

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Romney Review

I am not quite sure how to post a link, so I will just tell my readers, if there are any, that I have a review of the new biography of Romney that is now available on the website of the Washington Independent Review of Books.  It is, by the by, a great little book…

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