The Chinese Joan of Arc
Lin Zhao was a figure of Chinese dissidence under Mao. This daughter of a bourgeois, the eldest child of an affluent family in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, engaged in the Communist...
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Recent news More posts »You are an Eternal Book
In those early days, the poet’s mother was an idolized figure, the object of the poet’s total love. ‘At least you are an eternal book’, Baudelaire wrote at the dawn of his 18th...
To be a visionary
Herman Melville once wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in these words: In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my...
Is etymology relevant?
It did not take us long to transform civilization. In fifty years, we have almost stopped making war, standardised the possibility of making love without increasing the...
Montaigne’s back room
In these days of solitary confinement, this correspondent remembers a one-time lawyer and courtier in 16th century France who inscribed a few lines in Latin on a pillar of his...
That Vital Need for the Pestilence-stricken Multitude
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s . . . Thus exploded the...