Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

Wayne Brown's column in today's Jamaica Observer describes a visit last year to Finca Vigia, Hemingway's hilltop estate outside Havana.

I cringe whenever I hear someone describe Hemingway's prose as "the finest ... of the 20th century". Brown goes even further, calling Papa "the composer of perhaps half-a-million sentences that shine today every bit as wonderfully as they shone 50 and 75 years ago" — I wonder what statistical mechanism produced this approximate figure?