The symbol of the New Testament and the Christian Church is a cross, which stands for a love faithful despite physical agony and rejection by the world. No amount of air-conditioning and pew-cusioning in the suburban church can cover over ...

Commencement speakers have a good deal in common with grandfather clocks: Standing usually some six feet tall, typically ponderous in construction, more traditional than functional, their distinction is largely their noisy communication of...

William Crary Brownell had the misfortune of living for over a generation into the twentieth century, well beyond the late-Victorian milieu in which his critical temper worked with synthetic ease and assurance. Increasingly anachronistic a...

SOURCE: Davis, Barbara Beckerman. Review of After Nature, by W. G. Sebald. Antioch Review 62, no. 1 (winter 2004): 171. In the following review, Davis offers a positive assessment of After Nature. After Nature, Sebald's first work, publishe...

William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947) was an American sociologist and educator. He was a pioneer in the scientific use of personal documents and in pointing to the interplay between personality and culture. On Aug. 13, 1863, W. I. Thomas was bo...

A World War II refugee, Werner Michael Blumenthal (born 1926) used his academic and business skills to reach the highest levels of American government, industry, and banking. W. Michael Blumenthal, one of two children of Ewald and Rose Val...

William Patrick Kinsella, also known as W.P Kinsella was born in Edmonton Canada, on May 25th, 1935. While his father, John Kinsella, attended his everyday job as a contractor, his mother, Olive Kinsella, stayed home to be a mother and educ...

W. R. Rodgers was one of only two Irish poets of his generation who enjoyed a substantial British and American reputation, the other being Louis MacNeice, a fellow Ulsterman. In the 1940s and 1950s Rodgers worked for the British Broadcasti...

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In 1947 he received an A.B. in English from Princeton University. He worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca ...

W. W. Jacobs, remembered today almost exclusively for his horror story "The Monkey's Paw" (The Lady of the Barge, 1902), was one of the most popular English humorists of the early twentieth century. His stories, many of them amusing tales ...

For almost half a century Thomas the Tank Engine and his fellow engines from Rev. Wilbert Vere Awdry's Railway series have delighted children. World sales of more than 9 million copies, with 750,000 titles sold per year, attest to their co...

1882-1969 Polish mathematician who produced 724 papers and 50 books on the subject of mathematics. At a time when the Russians were aiming their efforts at keeping the Poles illiterate and generally uninformed, Sierpinski entered the Depar...

WACH, JOACHIM [FIRST EDITION] (1898–1955), German-American historian of religions. Wach was born in Chemnitz, Saxony, and died while vacationing in Orselina, Switzerland. He was a descendant of Moses Mendelssohn, a lineage that affe...

"It was an underground sensation that became the 'Star Wars' of the new millennium," wrote Gina McIntyre in the Hollywood Reporter, "a thinking man's action film born aloft by the cultural zeitgeist: a time of paranoia, rife with fear that...

At her death in 1965, Helen Waddell's nephew, Mayne Waddell, wrote a letter to Helen's sister, Meg Waddell Martin, describing his aunt as "perhaps the greatest woman-scholar" of the early half of the twentieth century. Twenty-one years lat...

Wade Hampton III (1818-1902) was a Confederate general, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator. In the 1880s he dominated politics in his native state. Wade Hampton III was descended from a prominent South Carolina family. Born on March...

Wladyslaw Sikorski (1881-1943) played a major political and military role in the history of Poland. He founded a secret nationalist organization, guided the modernization of the army, and led a government-in-exile when Poland was invaded b...

SOURCE: Fleming, Juliet. “Now You're Talkin' Sense.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 1958 (10 April 1998): 19. In the following review, Fleming evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Wag the Dog and The Edge. David Mamet's voluminous ...

The world does not pay for what a person knows, but it pays for what a person does with what he knows. I've always been worried about people who are willing to work for nothing. Sometimes that's all you get from them, nothing. Give the lab...

Henry R. Wagner had an incredible memory. Names, dates, and events lodged in his mind to be sorted and used in the scores of books and articles he wrote during the long afternoon of his life. In explaining why he had left an important and ...