Wes Phillips

I love the way the interview begins with a line that echoes the opening line of Burgess' Earthly Powers. The man who gave us The Quiet American also had some prescient things to say about future conflicts America might participate in.

Lovely essay on Greene's friendship with a genuine Foreign Office undercover agent. Peter Edmund James Leslie was an ex-Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, owned shares in a diamond mine, worked as an arms salesman, and served as a Vice-Consul—in others words, he was the very template of a Graham Greene protagonist.

Sounds like a country song, no?

Mark Lowery's Exciting World of Chess reproduces two of the immortal chess games of all time: the 1851 "Immortal Game" between Anderssen and Kieseritzky and the 1852 Anerssen-Dufresne "Evergreen" game. The best part, if you struggle with chess notation, Lowery has animated the games so you can watch them unfold—at your speed.

I almost called Christopher Moore the funniest writer you've never heard of, but his sales indicate that an awful lot of people have not only heard of him, but have bought his books. He's not perzackly a household name, but I'd put him in the company of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, and Carl Hiiassen—you know, writers whose books you save for when you need a can't-fail pick-me-up.

Socrates, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift . . . and Trey Parker and Matt Stone?

My first year in New York, my friend Larry Bassman was stunned to learn I'd never been to an opera, so he picked up the phone and ordered two tickets to that night's performance at the Met. It was Peter Grimes, starring Jon Vickers. What a tough act to follow.