Justice is one of the moral virtues that, to the greatest degree, orients people toward a community and governs exchanges between individuals. Literature can coherently reproduce moral paradigms originating from the Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition. The discourse of virtues permeates many levels of literature in the...

IAN MCEWAN'S new novella, On Chesil Beach, is just 176 pages long and happi ly, on this occasion, there's not a whiff of plagiarism in the sea air. The book has been widely praised by the critics as a tightly focused human drama...

“How do I look?”“Very good. I must say I’m amazed.” George Peppard’s classic line in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, delivered as Audrey Hepburn sweeps into the room in a wide-brimmed hat and black A-line dress, sums it all up. Gamine, doe-eyed and devastatingly elegant, Hepburn defined a style...

Here’s a Valentine’s Day tale. Prepare yourself. An English journalist came to New York. She was attractive and witty, and right away she hooked up with one of New York’s typically eligible bachelors. Tim was 42, an investment banker who made about $5...

There is nothing [in Breakfast at Tiffany's] for anybody in search of a "major" novelist but at his best, Capote is very, very good, as is illustrated by the fragment called "A Christmas Memory" which appears at the end of this collection…. It is full of kitchen smells and tastes, of outdoor excursions to gather nuts and holly, of the world of things and of childlike human warmth. One is tempted to quote, but it is contrived of so many small touches that one would b...

"Breakfast at Tiffany's" is a valentine of love, fashioned by way of reminiscence, to one Holly Golightly…. This is a very funny portrait of an ex-child wife from some place named Tulip, Tex.—who made several mistakes upon coming to New York…. She is a wild thing searching for something to belong to. (p. 5)

Of an exhibition of D. H. Lawrence's paintings, largely nudes, Rebecca West once noted: "Mr. Lawrence has very pink friends." In "Breakfast at Tiffany's" Mr. Capote has very lost friends or, more accurately, one very lost friend, Miss Holiday Golightly, who is surrounded by as false-hearted a clutch of drab witches and cut-rate warlocks as ever picked one another's bones at the Stork Club…. [Her compressed saga] is remindful around the edges of Djuna B...