Canter Bridge

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‘LSJ‘, as this good friend of a book is called by specialists of ancient Greek language and linguistics, is a staple.

You wouldn’t skip breakfast before heading to work. You wouldn’t wear dress shoes without socks. You wouldn’t fail to own a well-worn copy of this classic Greek-English lexicon if your work immerses you in ancient Greek. (more…)

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Before there were computers, before there were even ball point pens, Edwin Hatch and Henry Redpath churned out this fundamental work on the Greek Old Testament.

The laborious care–one wants to say love–which they brought to the first translation of the Hebrew Bible is a testament to that species of linguistic rigor and respect for the text that is too rare in the humanities and even in biblical studies these days. (more…)

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Gleason Archer was an amazingly learned man, representing a kind of conservative biblical scholar trained in the Albright School and its astonishing capacity for managing multiple Ancient Near Eastern languages, the growing field of ‘biblical archaeology’, and an inside-out knowledge of the biblical texts. (more…)

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When an historian treats a great figure of the past or touches upon the canon of literature, his or her speculative choices gain credibility to the degree that he or she controls the data.

Stephen Greenblatt’s intensely speculative exploration of William Shakespeare is data-driven and anchored in a stupendous familiarity with the poet’s historical moment and the documentary fund that allows us access to the time and place in which the Bard strode large across the land. Or at least across London, where his profession was and his family was not. (more…)

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If you think about economics, you need this Economist/Bloomberg Press publication or one very much like it.

For clarity on all matters of the public record–not just economics–nobody beat The Economist newspaper, a British ‘news magazine’ whose largest national readership is now in the USA. (more…)

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Appreciative readers (they tend to be long-term readers as well) of The Economist sometimes wonder why misspellings and non sequiturs are virtually absent from that superb weekly magazine. (more…)

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