Author Archive

Colin Dickey: The Addicted Life of Thomas De Quincey How Thomas De Quincey turned his debilitating addiction to opium into a revival of the English essay.; A Fire in the Belly Spontaneous combustion via overindulging in spirits cited by temperance advocates; Charles Dickens.; Living in the Margins In medieval marginalia, you might find complaining monks, a nun breastfeeding a monkey, and sexual wordplay. Oh, and doodles, lots of doodles.; The Patron Saint of Dark Days The shortest day of the year can drive anyone a little crazy, including Vincent Van Gogh.; Skyscrapers of the Dead While vertical cemeteries may seem like a radical proposition to relieve urban areas, they were first suggested by nineteenth-century cemetery reformers.; On Bones and Libraries St. Jerome and Jorge Luis Borges had very different ideas of what made the perfect library, one finite and one infinite.; The Cadaver Method Colin Dickey explains how the citizens of nineteenth-century Vienna had access to universal health care, for a price.