[Editor’s note: Only a few spaces remain for our Venice trip in March 2023. You can contact our travel partner Worldwide Quest to learn more.] Act I: Love at First Sight I was nineteen, a student and an aspiring artist, when I walked into the Frari church in Venice and […]
[Editor’s note: Nella Cotrupi talks about the very special seminar she has planned on three women Italian novelists. The first, Elena Ferrante, needs no introduction. Grazia Deledda and Elsa Morante, both important influences on Ferrante, also write with keen psychological insight about their characters’ interior and exterior lives. This is […]
To mark Election Day in the US, we asked Classical Pursuits leaders to name some of their favourite novels, biographies, films, essays, TV shows and more where the focus is on politics and the political process. What would you recommend? Let us know! From Don Spandier: One of my favorite […]
So you’ve got your huge book — Vergil, Joyce, Proust, Dostoevsky, Tocqueville. It’s a rich and difficult one — and you are preparing for your seminar. In today’s post, I’d like to talk about what happens after seminar. Now there are perhaps several reasons why you’ve signed up for a […]
Today Classical Pursuits talks with friends of many years John Riley and Gary Schoepfel, who are leading our upcoming seminar Understanding Conservatism: The Search for Shared Beliefs. All affiliations welcome! Our agenda is simple: working together toward true understanding. In John and Gary’s view, this will make us more patient, […]
Hamilton. Many love it. Some just hate it. I’m one of those who love it. And my kids love it too. I love the big thesis of the show that you don’t have to look like the founding fathers (that is, be white) to learn from and be inspired by […]
Since Classical Pursuits went online at the beginning of the pandemic, leader and philosopher Wendy O’Brien has been nothing of short of a force of nature. She’s led seminars on Montaigne, 20th-century women painters, and much more. Her latest seminar is on Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement. This novel went […]
We are happy to bring dramatic works, long a part of Classical Pursuits, to our online seminars. English teacher, improv actor and longtime Classical Pursuits leader Hunter Dunn is pairing two giants of 20th-century theatre, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame. These plays, so stripped-down in setting and plot, […]
Today Classical Pursuits talks with John Riley, who is leading our upcoming seminar on two short story collections by the hugely influential Richard Wright. Largely self-taught, Wright became part of the Federal Writer’s Project in 1932. The success of Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) led to a Guggenheim Fellowship that helped […]
Upon that night, when fairies light On Cassilis Downans dance, Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze, On sprightly coursers prance; Or for Colean the route is ta’en, Beneath the moon’s pale beams; There, up the cove, to stray and rove, Among the rocks and streams To sport that night. […]