The Prague Spring of 1968 was a lost fight for freedom—at least freedom to voice an opinion or ask redress for past injustice. It ended badly. Czechoslovak citizens confronted the bitter reality that darkness had returned. Many suffered for having stood up.

But Czechs and Slovaks, having lived for generations dominated by stronger neighbors, found consolation in sly humor, and this was true in 1968 too. A senior Czech Communist with whom I was well acquainted, and who genially called me soudruh (comrade), once asked rhetorically why states in the “Socialist Camp” were brothers, whereas in the West they were merely friends. The answer: one gets to choose his friends.

Czechoslovakia had well-wishers, but no friends, and could not choose its brothers, especially the big suspicious one to the east.

I will tell you what the provenance of that book was. The magazine I was working for—in New York, which was called Inside Sports, and it was owned by Newsweek—went out of business. I came back to Princeton where Christina and I were living. . . .  And I said, Well I was going to have to fall back on what I know how to do, which was write novels. And Christina said, Why don’t you write a novel about somebody who’s happy? Which was a bolt out of the blue … And I thought, What would make a person happy? When I stopped being a novelist and started writing sports, I realized that in a conventional sense I had gone down a rung. And I thought, Gee, going down a rung made me so glad, so happy, and maybe that would be a thing a person could do to make himself happy: to quit being this thing that wasn’t working for him, or was hard or amorphous and also unsuccessful and go down to something you could do with some pleasure.

[The failure to find an audience for my first two books forced me] to think long and hard about what good literature is to the people who read it.  I know when I wrote those two novels and they didn’t get me anywhere … to write the third one I really had to do something to myself that I hadn’t done before. I had to bump up my game in a really considerable way. And one of the ways I bumped up my game was to think, I want to write a book that someone, in the sense that Walter Benjamin talks about, that someone can use, which is to say a book that when you read it will, in some way, not because it has a happy ending but because of the passage the reader experiences when she or he passes through the book, that that will in some way redeem you, that the access to art, that the access to language, that it will be felicitous, that it will be funny, that it will have things to give you, and so that really became something I wanted to do a lot.

From “Romantic Gastronomy: An Introduction,” by Denise Gigante, published in Romantic Praxis Circles series, January 2007. Romantic Circles is a project website of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

While some scholars of late have wanted to downplay the influence of the French Revolution on the rise of the restaurant as a public forum for discretionary dining, there is little doubt that, in its modern instantiation, the restaurant is a result of revolution. The political events of the 1790s released the best French chefs from aristocratic patronage into the open market of Paris, where they set up as restaurateurs in abandoned hotels or in the arcade of the Palais-Royal. With the aristocrats having escaped to other cities in Europe, these talented culinary professionals found themselves catering to a new bourgeois clientele, the nouveaux riches. Whereas Addison and Steele had mingled with wits, scribblers, politicians, and other members of the growing bourgeoisie (financiers, bankers, lawyers) over stimulating cups of coffee in the coffeehouses that spread from Paris in the 1680s, the birth of the restaurant following the French Revolution was a phenomenon distinct from the coffeehouse culture that helped shape intellectual life of Enlightenment Europe. The key difference between the coffeehouse, where information and conversation were exchanged (contributing to the formation of the so-called public sphere), and the restaurant of the Romantic period was that the former did not feature food as its primary concern. While refreshments and pastries had been served in cafés, and even more substantial victuals in some of the British coffeehouses, conversation, political and cultural, not food, was the focus of attention. This all changed once the restaurant, spurred by talented French chefs, encouraged the application of aesthetic principles to the culinary arts. In the culture of gastronomy that soon spread to England, food was taken seriously as an object of appreciation, offering an occasion for aesthetic judgment and the exercise of the higher mental faculties, much like other forms of art. Grimod de la Reynière thus spoke of syrups "considérés philosophiquement," just as his pseudonymous British imitator Launcelot Sturgeon wrote "On Mustard, Philosophically Considered."     This 1931 Duesenberg Model J Murphy Convertible Coupe is one of many classic cars at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana, which has recently received grants to support a conservation survey of its holdings and to rehouse its archives. —Courtesy Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum