The Peter Bell Phenomenon In the midst of graduate school at Hopkins, I discovered that I had one set of reasons for being there, and my professors had an altogether different set of reasons for asking me to be there. My dissertation, on the novelist Kingsley Amis, was an effort to fulfill my own objectives […]
Richard II: Shakespeare’s Legal Brief This paper, produced as a term paper in an independent study course in law school, was published in the Georgetown Law Journal in 1982. To my great pleasure, other scholars still cite it from time to time. Let me again thank my supervisor, Professor Alice Brumbaugh, Emerita of the University […]
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass In 2008, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra mounted a grand new production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, performed in Baltimore, at Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center, among other places. I was commissioned to write four pieces about this masterwork for the BSO’s website. (The recording won a deserved Grammy.) As the Orchestra has […]
Next Literary Writing Kingsley Amis As recounted in About the Author, I did my doctoral dissertation on Kingsley Amis. When Zachary Leader published his biography of Amis in 2007, Mark Lasswell of the Wall Street Journal tracked me down, and asked me to write a review and to be sure to incorporate my personal experiences of […]