Essays

Articles in this section

• "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" by Étienne de la Boétie (1548)

  6 October 2022 by Étienne de la Boétie

  Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) was a shooting star in the firmament of 16th-century France, a poet, jurist, essayist and philologist who graduated from the University of Orleans at the age of 22, was appointed court magistrate also at the age of 22 and became a member of Parliament the (...)

• English is a wordy language!

  1 December 2021 by Ray

  We have compared the word-counts of the considerable number of translations into English from other languages on our site – 423 at latest count – with the following results: - ALL OF THE TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH OF RUSSIAN AND GERMAN TEXTS HAVE WITHOUT EXCEPTION SIGNIFICANTLY MORE WORDS THAN (...)

• The Great Baseball Scandal - how the Mob won the 1919 World Series, by Nelson Algren

  29 April 2020 by Nelson Algren

  Born and bred in Chicago, a life-long fan of baseball in general and of his home team, the Chicago White Sox in particular, Nelson Algren (1909-1981), one of the finest American authors of his time, was particularly qualified to analyse the inner workings of the most sensational scandal in the (...)

• Interesting things read recently that I would like to share with you

  25 May 2006 by Ray

  INDEX Citations Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (1851) Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope (1857) Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens (1857) A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens (1859) Adam Bede, by George Eliot (1859) The Mill on The Floss, by George Eliot (1860) Silas Marner, by George (...)

• "I Love Awfully Bad Writing", by James Clarke

  30 November 2005 by James Clark

  I LOVE AWFULLY BAD WRITING
  I love awfully bad writing. Indeed I can say (with all due modesty) that I am quite good at it myself. This might explain why I am fascinated by the annual Bulwyer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening to a novel.
  Every year since 1984 San Jose State (...)