John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.