Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Las Meninas (detail), by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Arts & Letters

Volume III, Number 2 | spring 2010

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Preamble

Lady in a Veil

By Lewis H. Lapham

Despite being told that art is somehow sacred, it’s better to take a naive delight in the thing itself.

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In the Gloom the Gold

By Jamie James

Consider the legacy of Ezra Pound—no poet has ever been so influential, so controversial, and so little read.

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Map

Telling Tales

The evolutions of four stories.

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c. 550 BC | Athens

By the Scroll

Peter Quince picks the parts.More

1831 | Paris

Writing in Stone

Victor Hugo explains the language of architecture.More

1954 | Washington, DC

Guidelines

Establishing a comic book code.More

Charts & Graphs

Under the Influence

Drugs used during composition.

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Black and white photograph of Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

Writer Henry James.

Photograph of American novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler.

Portrait of young Arthur Schopenhauer wearing a brown suit and a cravat.

French novelist Gustave Flaubert.

English novelist, essayist, and critic George Orwell.

I cannot live without books, but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1815

Portrait of young Arthur Schopenhauer wearing a brown suit and a cravat.

German philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno.

Arthur Schopenhauer & Theodor Adorno

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

The World in Time

Robert D. Kaplan

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More

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