"Things past and passing and to come" are what the golden birds sing about in the William Butler Yeats poem Sailing to Byzantium "to keep a drowsy emperor awake."

Robert Wernick has for many years been taking notes on these things and offering a number of them (three hundred and sixty-one at the latest count) to drowsy readers of Life, Harper's Bazaar, The Saturday Evening Post, The Kenyon Review, Readers' Digest, Connoisseur, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, The Territorial Enterprise, Encounter, Sports Illustrated, Minotaure, Quest, The Times of Malta, Cahiers d'Hermeutique postmoderne, Venture, The New Republic and other periodicals.

He also owes the word sciolist, which means a person with a great deal of superficial knowledge, to Yeats, who complained once to Lady Gregory that too many people were coming to see one of his plays. There were only one hundred people, he said, who could understand what he was saying, the rest were all sciolists, pickpockets or opinionated bitches.

This web-site opens its democratic arms to all four categories.

New Articles

• Brisking About the Life
  Helpful Hints for Candidated Nonagenarians. Two Chapters from my New Book.
  
  
• Prince Talleyrand
  The Ultimate survivor.
  
  
• Gorvidalio
  The Miscreant Mishandled.
  
  
• Dada's Dada
  Memory of Tristan Tzara.
  
  
• Chagall
  The Fiddler on Your Roof.
  
  
• MOMA
  New World's In Birth.
  
  
• Montesquieu
  The Godfather of the American Constitution.
  
  
• Dr. Fraad
  Not Fraud or Freud.
  
  
  

Four Cheers for Dame Gossip

The Grandmother of Us All

A disorderly and gossipy analysis of an activity which remains, whatever you have heard about it, the fourth most common of all human activities after eating, drinking and sex; which antedates religion politics war education and taxes; which created language in the first place, will outlive the Internet, and deserves your serious attention to-day.

1. The Illustrious Lineage and Bad Name of Gossip
   
2. The Genealogy of Gossip
   
3. Critique of Pure Gossip
   
4. Critique of Practical Gossip
   

1. History in Gossip
   
2. Gossip in History
   

1. The Dark Ages of Gossip
   
2. Gossip Redux
   
3. The Golden Age of Gossip
   
4. The Land of Dreams
   
5. Gossip in Poetry
   

1. Winchell's Way
   
2. Winchell's Progeny
   
3. The Age of Blog (coming soon)
   

Pronouncements

1. Adam's Fall
   Who shot the albatross?
   
   
2. Art of the Interview
   The Making of a Journalist
   
   
3. Yelling Consonants
   The End of Art in Our Time
   
   

A Book of Loners

1. Uncle Mike
   And the Chocolate Bar of Queen Victoria
   
   
2. Mister Mac
   Death and Life in the Oil Fields
   
   
3. Johnny Hopper
   His War Against the Germans
   
   
4. Diego Giacometti
   His Brother's Brother
   
   

Memories

1. A Memory of Marilyn Monroe
   On a Ferris Wheel
   
   
2. A Memory of Molly Howe
   The Faery Child and the IRA foot
   
   
3. A Memory of Sam Beckett
   
   
   
4. Cambronne Picnic
   The End of the World in June 1940
   
   
5. Two French Lessons
   In Menlo Park. In Paris.
   
   
6. Dada's Dada
   Memory of Tristan Tzara.
   
   
7. Dr. Fraad
   Not Fraud or Freud.
   
   

Historical Footnotes

1. The Rise and Fall of the Devil
   Since his creation by the prophet Zarthustra in the Sixth Century B.C.
   1. The Devil Up
      
   2. The Devil Down
      
      
2. The Day the Roman Empire Fell
   The Lynching of Andronicus I Comnenus on September 14, 1185
   
   
3. The Horny Priest of Montaillou
   Sex and heresy and retribution in the 14th century AD
   
   
4. Richard III
   Villain or Victim?
   
   
5. The Encyclopédie
   Open Season on the Wisdom of the Ages
   
   
6. The South Sea Bubble
   The New Economy in the Eighteenth Century
   
   
7. Summit Conferences
   From Richard the Lion Heart to Ronald Reagan and beyond
   
   
8. Yalta
   What did and did not happen there
   
   
9. The Bell Tolled at Brunete
   How Franco won his civil war
   
   
10. Fanny Kemble Wins the Civil War
    After four months on St. Simons Island.
    
    
11. Lepenski Vir
    The Birth of Sculpture and Town Planning on a Mesolithic Ledge
    
    
12. Sinai
    The Mountain of the Lord
    
    
13. The Jewish Diaspora
    A dead past alive in Tel Aviv
    
    
14. John Marshall, Chief Justice
    And the Creation of the American Nation
    
    
15. The Icelandic Sagas
    And the birth of the Icelandic nation
    
    
16. The Return of the Corn God
    After 157 sexless years in the White House
    
    
17. "I Know Nothing"
    Americans Kick the Pope in 1846
    
    

Mediterranean Scenes

1. Carthage Burning
   How empires die
   
   
2. Malta
   The birthplace of architecture
   
   
3. Cyprus
   The birthplace of love
   
   
4. Corsica
   Isle of Beauty, Isle of Bandits
   
   

American Scenes

1. Big Sur
   Life on the Edge
   
   
2. Reno
   The Good Life in the Great American Desert
   
   
3. Tom Benton
   Down the Wide Missouri with an old SOB
   
   
4. Biltmore
   The House that Vanderbilt
   
   
5. Monticello
   The Dream House of a Dilettante
   
   
6. MOMA
   New World's In Birth.
   
   

French Scenes

1. Sarzay
   Everyman his own chatelain
   
   
2. Roquefort
   Where the Cheese Come From
   
   
3. An Excursion in the Pyrenees
   What they do in the mountains
   
   
4. The Fatal House-Warming
   Vaux-le-Vicomte
   
   
5. The Lady of Vix
   Life in the Top Drawer in 500 BC
   
   

Brief Lives

1. Le Douanier Rousseau
   Picasso in human form
   
   
2. Goya
   The Light and the Blackness
   
   
3. The Real William Tell
   Was he a Dane or an Icelander or a Celtic Mother Goddess?
   
   
4. The Tragedy of Camille Claudel
   From Wuthering Heights to the Madhouse
   
   
5. Salvador Dali
   
   1. Dali lives
      In the Hotel Meurice in Paris
      
   2. Dali dies
      In Cadaquès in Catalonia
      
      
6. Ezra Pound
   The treason trial that never was
   
   
7. Paul Klee
   And his Twittering Machine
   
   
8. George Sand
   The first woman to wear pants in public
   
   
9. Count No-Count Esterhazy
   The Man who created the Dreyfus Case
   
   
10. Pushkin
    Russia's everlasting poet
    
    
11. Ludwig Bemelmans
    a.k.a. Madeline
    
    
12. Joe Pilates
    How to be an Animal
    
    
13. Toulouse-Lautrec
    The noble dwarf
    
    
14. Philip Equality
    The godfather of radical chic
    
    
15. Call him Ishmael
    Darkness at Noon for Herman Melville
    
    
16. Juliet Lives Here
    And will answer your letters
    
    
17. Goxwa Borg
    Graffiti of Eternity
    
    
18. Joseph Cornell
    The Lightfoot Boxer
    
    
19. Chagall
    The Fiddler on Your Roof.
    
    
20. Montesquieu
    The Godfather of the American Constitution.
    
    

Building Blocks of Civilization

1. Pepper
   How It Made the World Sneeze
   
   
2. Smokestacks
   Pillars of Western Civilization
   
   
3. Sound Bites
   Yesterday and Today and Forever
   
   

Royal Scenes

1. The Escorial
   Philip II's Offering to God and Empire
   
   
2. Ravenna
   The Artifice of Eternity
   
   
3. Versailles
   The Sun King Shines Again
   
   

Miscellaneous

1. Nightmares
   When and Why we have them
   
   
2. The Beaver cometh
   The Last Words of Simone de Beauvoir
   
   
3. Why Not Spoil the Wilderness?
   If We Could
   
   
4. One-Eyed Jacks
   From the giant Polyphemus and the god Odin to the Man in the Hathaway Shirt and Robert Wernick
   
   
5. Conspiracy Theories
   How to recognize them, how to make them
   
   
6. The British Library
   A New Home for the Hub of the Intellectual Universe
   
   
7. An Interview with Jean Genet
   The Gentleman Thief
   
   
8. Rurik Imperial
   A Real-Life Character in a Russian Novel
   
   
9. Gorvidalio
   The Miscreant Mishandled.
   
   

To the right you see a photograph of the author.

A youthful admirer, seeing this photograph, asked him if anyone had ever told him that he looked like Robert Einstein.

"Who," he asked, "is Robert Einstein?"

"Oh you know," she said impatiently, "the famous poet."