What’s so bad about having a mentally deficient ruler? Surely the ruler’s advisors can make wise decisions and tell him what to say? When I hear such reasoning, I think of Tsar Nicholas II, his sad ...
An obolus is a small silver coin the Greeks placed under the tongues of the dead so they could pay Charon as he ferried them across the river Styx to the underworld. Andrew Rickard named his ...
We have known composers who conduct, but conduct mainly their own music: Stravinsky, for example, or Copland. We have known composers who are also big-league conductors: Bernstein, Previn, Boulez.
Everyone knows about Aesop and his fables, but few have ever read straight through any serious collection of them, never mind Ben Edwin Perry’s unsurpassed Aesopica of 1952, which assembles 725, along ...