In the long summer vacation of 1971, I "worked" on a construction site in the English countryside where they were proposing to build a new hangar for the U.S. Air Force, and used the proceeds to take a holiday in Greece with my friend Charles. Originally, the idea had been to hitchhike, having crossed the channel on the boat and made our way from Calais to Paris by bus. We soon found out what I had been warned of, that the French can't abide hitchhikers. After sleeping in the Bois de Boulogne we fluked a short ride to a small town by the name of Auxerre, and there our luck [...]

In preparation for Memorial Day on Monday-the unofficial beginning of Summer 2010-we asked writers to reflect on the season. We'll be publishing Here Comes Summer all week.

When Henry James first met Oscar Wilde in Boston in 1882, he told Wilde that he was very nostalgic for London.

"Really? You care for places? The world is my home," Wilde replied flamboyantly (and, erroneously, alas, though it was true for just a little while.) Did that ever make Henry James mad! He really ought to have known better, because Wilde was an incorrigible tease. James was all wanting to be We Sophisticates with Wilde, I guess, but Wilde wouldn't, because [...]

Here's some footage of the riots that followed yesterday's vote in Italy to keep Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government in office.

"WE ARE ONCE AGAIN THE SCHMUCKS OF EUROPE!" -While the Daily Mail's translation of German tabloid Bild's disapproving headline concerning the bailout of Greece is perhaps the most colorful way of putting it-"deppen" can also be rendered as "idiots," "morons," "dopes," "schnooks," etc.-there's something pretty awesome about it all the same.

The Greek island known variously as Holy Ghost, The Island of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Holy Trinity, or just plain Trinity, owes its greatest renown, despite its lavish New Testamentish nomenclature, to the cameo role it played in the pagan classical age. This 12-acre slip of an atoll was a staging ground for the Persian armies laying siege to Thermopylae, the famed last stand of those hot, well-oiled Spartan souls hymned by our own latter-day Thucydides, Frank Miller. Now, however, Greek government officials are straining to find a way to convert Holy Ghost, and the nation's 6000 or so other island outcroppings into [...]