Sublime

I especially enjoyed the work of Sir John Woodroffe (1865–1936), a.k.a. “Arthur Avalon,” who—while prominently serving as Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court in British India—spent his private hours explaining, defending and ultimately practicing in the then widely reviled Hindu religious schools of Shaiva and Shakta Tantrism.

Nineteen twenty-three was one of Broadway’s brightest years. John Barrymore played Hamlet just a few blocks away from where his sister Ethel was appearing in Romeo and Juliet. Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author also opened. Most critics cited Galsworthy’s Loyalties as the best play of the season.

Grace Macaulay – in whose veins ran Essex rivers and Bible ink; in whose philosophy the devils of hell and the saints of Bethesda did battle with her reason and her nature – sat with her phone on the bare floor of a Hackney room and thought of Thomas Hart. Come home, he’d written, you wretched child, and I am wretched, she thought, and I think I’d