Category: Wine

Freud and Strauss offer contrasting impressions of the nightlife of old Vienna. Hitler painted a verbal picture of the same city as it was seen by those who could not afford Sacher Torte and waltzes, let alone dream therapy with the good doctor, those for whom the opera (the solemnities of Wagner, one gathers, rather…

Our first spring in Minnesota came late. It had not been much of a winter, in fact we felt fairly blasé about our capacity to survive Minnesota’s fabled frigidity. (But oh, how we have learned since!) The torrents pouring over St. Antony Falls inspired no particular shock nor awe, unlike the ceaseless roar of Spring…

The early monks of the Egyptian desert often faced their demons head on. Abba Antony in the hot sandy silence of the wilderness found himself attacked by several wild beasts at once. They roared and hissed, they buffeted his makeshift cell until it shook. He stared them down. They gnashed their teeth and left. Often,…

Those few of us who spend our working lives in the Roman Empire find current events depressingly familiar. The superpowers of Late Antiquity, Rome and Persia, spent much of the half-millennium before the rise of Islam at war. The Persian Empire incorporated not only modern Iran, but also Iraq. The cockpit of imperial confrontation was…

It always seems to happen on a Friday. The phone rings and someone says, “Do you speak Latin?” and I reply “Well, I teach it,” or something equally noncommittal. Then comes the question. “What is the Latin word for ‘color’?” Phew, that’s easy. “Color, spelt the way Americans spell it.” “Well what’s the Latin for…

I recently spent a sad evening in a basement in South Minneapolis. An acquaintance was seeking subsidised legal advice about the custody of his children. He had found it pretty difficult uncovering a voluntary agency able to offer advice to men on such matters. But now here he was with six other unfortunates waiting his…