Uncensored John Simon

Jokes are our friends that accompany us through life—at least he good ones are. They made us laugh when we first heard or read them, and th...

“Are critics necessary?” a good many people ask, not a few of them the butts of some kind of criticism. Certainly if dray horses, victims o...

I have sometimes been called (wrongly) a homophobe. But let’s start with the word “homosexual.” The “homo,” per se, has nothing to do with ...

Names are more significant than one might offhand assume.   I am thinking of first (or given, or Christian names) names, whose bearers may ...

There is a salient aspect of language that I haven’t handled hitherto--not alliteration, as in these consecutive h-words, but onomatopoeia,...

Be prepared for vehement disagreement with what follows, but mind that I am not proposing it as a binding universal truth, only as my o...

Some stories are, or ought to be, mythic. I may have already adduced them before and will try not to repeat myself, though these days my me...