American - Critic | 1948 -
I'm nothing if not a literary hedonist.
Michael Dirda
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I'm an appreciator. I love all kinds of books, and I want others to love them, too.
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Back in the 1950s and '60s, J. M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan' - starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard - was regularly aired on network television during the Christmas season. I must have seen it four or five times and remember, in particular, Ritchard's gloriously camp interpretation of Captain Hook.
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'The Admirable Crichton' is probably Barrie's most famous work after 'Peter Pan', nearly a pendant to that classic.
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To my mind, 'Dear Brutus' stands halfway between Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 'Into the Woods'. Like them, it is a play about enchantment and disillusion, dreams and reality.
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I didn't work for any newspapers in college, never worked for any newspaper before 'The Washington Post'.
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I've always liked an easygoing, colloquial style. I like the kind of reviewer who is essentially a fellow reader, an enthusiast, a fan.
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Not all of E. Nesbit's children's books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world, nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do.
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It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.
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I suppose movie theaters are the churches of the modern age, where we gather reverently to worship the tinsel gods of Hollywood.
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From the late 19th to the early 20th century, the December issue of almost any general-interest magazine regularly featured a holiday horror or two.
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I once read that there are more biographical works about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other man in history.
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