Paul Kildea, in his review of Jan Swafford’s Mozart: The Reign of Love, writes: “One critical development of the Enlightenment was that art escaped from religion and into the larger world.”
Yesterday afternoon, looking for things to put on Giftster, I read the "Books of the Year" feature in a month-old issue of The Spectator and came across Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee. I promptly added it to my list, even though I had never heard of the author.
In the evening I picked up Martin Amis's Inside Story and on page 69 read: "Twelve months earlier, along with four other British writers (Martina Warner, Hermione Lee, Melvyn Bragg, and Julian Barnes) I was a guest of the Friends of Israel Educational Trust."
We were in St. Petersburg over the weekend, visiting friends. (Which explains the two days of silence.) In one home I watched our friends’ sons – 11 and 13 – play video games on a large-screen TV. And I wondered: How can anyone these days expect boys to read books?
Here is a link to one of those events, my conversation with author Eric Weiner about his new book The Socrates Express.
https://booksandbooks.com/virtual-event/a-virtual-evening-with-eric-weiner-and-thomas-swick/
I recently bought a book that carried a blurb calling it a memoir of “uncommon grace.” At home I googled “uncommon grace” and got 140,000 results.