I said at the beginning of my first talk that this is not a critical age. It is an age of partisanship and not of detachment, an age in which it is especially difficult to see literary merit in a book with whose conclusions you disagree. Politics — politics in the most general sense —…

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner…

It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was…

Aristotle defines tragedy as, “the imitation of an action, serious, complete, and of certain magnitude, in a language beautiful in different parts with different kinds of embellishments, through action and not narration, and through scenes of pity and fear bringing about the catharsis of these emotions. According to Aristotle, an Epic is a narrative poem…

Happiness Man is born for only one purpose — to be happy. But what is happiness? It is that pleasant state of mind which is brought about by the habitual doing of good deeds. But to be happy, it is not sufficient merely to be good. It is necessary also to be blessed with a…

Plato was the most important literary critic before Aristotle. He was a teacher and had his own Academy. His literary criticism is contained in his Dialogues and in Republic. Aristotle was the great disciple of Plato, and it was he who took up the challenge to show that poetry was not only pleasant but also…