When he looked back at the menu as an old man, it brought back everything; the food, the wine, the private dining room, the pride he took in being able to pay for such a dinner, the convergence of his...

Shakespeare was an anti-Semite

Bordeaux are named after châteaux. Castles.

Their tastes change not because their palates improve but because they deteriorate.

Benjamin Franklin wrote that he would like to be embalmed in a cask of Madeira

we expect a wine of quality to demand something from us.

To nature lovers, the season of new beginnings is the spring, but to people who excel in school, it's the fall.

-the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of buttons polish, and a...

My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak.

When you think about Laos and about not having enough food and those dirty and torn-up clothes, you don't want to think. Here it is a great country. You are comfortable. You have something to eat. But...

her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass. The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with

Conquergood considered his relationship with the Hmong to be a form of barter, "a productive and mutually invigorating dialog, with neither side dominating or winning out." In his opinion, the...

The European immigrants who emerged from the Ford Motor Company melting pot came to the United States because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United...

One night when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking for some reason, about Treasure Island. I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim,...

The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book's physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to...

When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife.

But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.

-our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them.