Susanna Braund— The Aeneid tells the story of the foundation of Rome by colonists from the East, refugees from the city of Troy in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) after it was sacked by the Greeks at the end of the ten-year Trojan War, an event to which scholars traditionally assign the
John Batchelor— Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, the son of a highly skilled artist and sculptor, John Lockwood Kipling, and his wife Alice (nee Macdonald), who was the daughter of a celebrated Methodist. The Methodist background does not play a large part in Kipling’s life, but his
Evert Sprinchorn— For people with intellects, reading Ibsen was more than entertaining; it was enthralling. Reading his plays is equivalent to a journey through nineteenth-century thought, its art, politics, and philosophy. Ibsen’s collected works painted the intellectual landscape of his time as a magnificent panorama, which he traversed with a
Ernst Cassirer— In the human world we find a new characteristic which appears to be the distinctive mark of human life. The functional circle of man is not only quantitively enlarged; it has also undergone a qualitative change. Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself
Ambrogio A. Caiani— On the night of 5 July 1809 French forces kidnapped Barnabà Chiaramonti, Pope Pius VII, from his private apartments in the Quirinal Palace in Rome. He would spend the following five years as a prisoner of Napoleon. Ultimately, the Pope refused to renounce his central Italian kingdom,
This year Yale University Press published Samuel Johnson, a diverse and accessible selected works of eighteenth-century Britain’s preeminent man of letters. The following excerpt is a section from one of Johnson’s pseudonymous essays in the publication Rambler. This quality of looking forward into futurity seems the unavoidable condition of a
John Donatich— The recent passing of Theodore Margellos sent me to my bookshelf to look at the Margellos World Republic of Letters volumes lined up side by side. Together, they form a considerable library, with Yale and Margellos imprints on their spines. These books are among my most prized possessions.
John J. Collins— For many Christians the importance of biblical law and ethical demands has been relativized by the Christian emphasis on faith. “We know,” writes Saint Paul to the Galatians, “that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith of Jesus Christ.” The Pauline
Robert Louis Wilken— To understand how religious freedom came to be cherished as a fundamental human right, the story must begin long before the Enlightenment and the development of modern political ideas and institutions. Its origins are not political but religious, and its history is a tale of inwardness, of
Francis Su— Amid the great societal shifts wrought by the digital revolution and the transition to an information economy, we are witnessing the rapid transformation of the ways we work and live. Mathematical tools are now prominent in every sector of the workforce, including the most dominant ones; presently, technology