“This is not a warm and fuzzy picture but a hard look at how human behaviors reverberate through the planet’s systems in unexpected, even biocidal ways.” —Travis Diehl

Ali Smith’s “ghosts reach back to folklore, but they are also creatures of our dark and boggy present, of our anxieties and disconnection.” —Regina Marler

Ithell Colquhoun “took a significant step when she extended Daliesque methods to her writing—and in this lies her true originality.” —Marina Warner

“Among all the music and opera festivals of Europe,” Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes, “the Wexford Festival Opera, which marks its seventy-fifth anniversary later this month, is surely the unlikeliest.”

“The secret disease,” “the French disease,” “the pox”...whatever it was called, syphilis “ruined lives” in early modern London, and “not everyone had a rollicking good time on the way to getting it.” —Catherine Nicholson

“I can imagine [the regime’s prosecutor] arguing in front of a tribunal that I be given the death penalty, but doing it in a way that would leave me delighted with his speech.” —Václav Havel

None of the horrors of our political present would have surprised Judith Shklar, Mark Lilla writes, “except perhaps the speed with which the sinister, grinning cruelty of liberalism’s new enemies has been adopted by a large portion of the American public.”

“An unspecific God-that-failed haunts Wilfrid Sheed; each time he tries and fails to substitute Babe Ruth, jazz, or literature in that seat of authority he reenacts this primal disappointment.” —Jonathan Lethem

“The innovation of intellectual monopoly capitalism is that capitalists don’t always need to incur the costs of ownership in order to enjoy its benefits. They can boss people around without taking responsibility for them.” —Ben Tarnoff

“Peter Hujar flourished artistically as the recorder of his own milieu of artists, writers, and especially performers: the reticent observer reveling in the performative exuberance of others.” —Alan Hollinghurst

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the Wexford Festival Opera

Bodybuilding steroids have led to “an epidemic of abuse.... Steroid users have a mortality rate three times higher than the average and tend to die in greater numbers than their peers from suicide and heart disease.” —Gavin Francis

“Jürgen Habermas was seldom fashionable, and his prose was often difficult, as if each word carried the burden of responsibility for the modern world.” —Peter E. Gordon

Regina Marler on Ali Smith’s polysemous plots in her pair of novels Gliff and Glyph

“Around 11 percent of early modern rape trials ended in a conviction, but the conviction rate for trials involving venereal disease was 34 percent.” —Catherine Nicholson

“Respecting one’s elders is encoded into Indian life in a very different way—deference is a given. But that’s why these protests have been so remarkable. We’re seeing such a clear and vocal generational break for the first time.” —Poorna Swami

“Jonathan Buckley’s best fiction…is refreshingly free of self-regard: lovingly crafted but out of devotion to his characters rather than to exhibit his technical gifts.” —Lola Seaton

“Plenty of composers could, in theory, have noticed that a pianist’s left-hand figures can be so pleasurable and comforting to listen to that it might be worth promoting them to center stage, but Glass is the one who actually did.” —Matthew Aucoin