“If a great essayist is one who succeeds in getting his personality onto the page, then H. L. Mencken qualifies in spades. The problem is that his personality grows more predictable with closer acquaintance, just as the tricks of his prose style grow more familiar. Like most journalists, he is best consumed not in the bulk of a twelve-hundred-page boxed set but in small and carefully chosen doses…”
Archives for October 5, 2010
TT: Almanac
“No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.”
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day