"Two for the price of one. The sonnets — discussed and annotated by one of my favorite fab poets, Don Paterson. This isn’t academic yawn stuff — it’s exciting to read and it does your brain good."

"One of my favorite history books. It’s a story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and of an epistolary and academic friendship between two men, one of whom (unbeknownst to the other) was an inmate at an insane asylum."

"It took an American academic to research and diagnose this British class snobbishness about the activity of manufacturing. Astonishingly, it is more acceptable for the educated classes to go into banking or insurance rather than dirty their hands making things."

"Like lots of people, I really love Roxane Gay. This is one of my favorite essay collections I’ve read in the past five to ten years. She’s really good at conversational writing that’s also academic and intelligent and funny. After #MeToo there’s a lot of introspection, and people need to analyze themselves and see what feminist they’ll be. There’s no perfect feminist."

"This Criterion set is such a loving demonstration of what careful curatorial and academic devotion can produce. Not only is the film presented in a variety of formats, there’s also a wonderful documentary by Michel Ciment called Elia Kazan: Outsider, which I would never have had the chance to see otherwise. I felt I had privileged access to this extraordinary dramatic artist."

"Hart was a wonderful novelist—she wrote Damage, which has been made into a film, but also Sin and Oblivion—but she used to host these wonderful poetry evenings, and we’d all come and read for her at the library. First, she’d talk, without notes, for about 45 minutes about an author. She was never dry or academic, and would find ways to humanize her subjects"