Archive

History and contemporary life often present reflective persons with terrible ethical and political choices. One current American presidential candidate repeatedly tells audiences of the importance of “what can be”...

The Wanting Seedby anthony burgesspenguin, 288 pages, $12.29 Anthony Burgess’s satirical novel The Wanting Seed, first published in the U.S. in 1963, has just been reprinted in the paperback...

The End of Liberalism by chilton williamson jr. st. augustine’s press, 167 pages, $18 Chilton Williamson Jr. has been a significant man of letters in the conservative world for nearly fifty...

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolutionby c. l. r. jamesrnrnwith an introduction by christienna fryar and notes by james walvinrnrnpenguin modern classics, 416 pages,  £12.99...

I recently spent a day with my dog, revisiting two remote mountain valleys in the Tuscan-Romagnolan Apennine Mountains of northern Italy. I had first visited them briefly about fifty...

The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—and How to Fix Itby natalie wexleravery, 336 pages, $27 E. D. Hirsch Jr., distinguished scholar of comparative literature, is...

The great writer and moralist George Orwell began his literary career as a disciple of G. K. Chesterton. Even after Orwell explicitly diverged from some of Chesterton’s views in...

Fifty years ago, the scholar Quentin Anderson (1912–2003) published a powerful and ambitious book—The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History. It attacked Emerson, Thoreau, and...

Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architecht of the Spiritual World by Robert D. Denham University of Virginia Press, 373 pages, $37.50 Northrop Frye was one of the half-dozen most...

In The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewis noted that nothing he could say would keep some people from saying that he was anti-science, a charge he was nevertheless...

On January 22, 1991, the Roman phase of an investigatory process into the character and merits of John Henry Newman (1801-1890)-begun formally in 1958 in Birmingham, England-was completed with...

Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne by edward haviland miller university of iowa press, 596 pages, $35 Jefferson’s public career focused on securing for Americans,”...

In the course of a very long life, Malcolm Muggeridge made many enemies, but he surely made more friends, among whom it is one of the great pleasures of...

The Culture We Deserve by jacques barzun university press of new england, 185 pages, $19.95 “I have got materials toward a treatise,” Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in...

For the advanced writer of our time, Diana Trilling wrote twenty-five years ago in “The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer,” “the self is his supreme, even sole referent.” The...