Alan Jacobs

The protagonist of No Longer At Ease by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe is a young man named Obi Okonkwo who has recently returned to Nigeria after taking a degree in English literature at Oxford University. Obi’s interview for a civil service position turns into a discussion about . . . . Continue Reading »

The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracyby David CannadineYale University Press, 813 pages, $39.95 As might be expected of a book whose title echoes Gibbon’s magnum opus, David Cannadine’s history of the British aristocracy since 1875 is long, exhaustive, wide-ranging, and anecdotally . . . . Continue Reading »

Lately I’ve been noting an interesting linguistic phenomenon: the all-purpose word. You come across it most often in slang, especially the slang of children and adolescents. Take “narly,” for instance—a word which, in my limited acquaintance, seems capable of an almost infinite range of . . . . Continue Reading »