December 24, 2011
Christmas is for ghost stories. From my WSJ article on M.R. James: Each October, our culture turns its gaze to the ghostly and the ghastly. A century ago, however, James associated specters and their ilk with another season: Christmas. This yuletide linkage has deep roots: “A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one/Of sprites [...]
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December 23, 2011
Several Christmases ago, I wrote about A Christmas Carol for NRO: Dickens wrote a number of highly regarded books — Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities — but this brief one is his best known and best loved. It also single-handedly created a new genre of popular literature [...]
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