Roger Kimball

Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square by randy boyagoda image, 459 pages, $30 The Richard Neuhaus I knew first appears on page 179 of Randy Boyagoda’s biography of the founder and ­perpetual genius loci of First Things. It is then, anno Domini 1975, that RJN embarks on that process . . . . Continue Reading »

Nearly everyone cares—or says he cares—about art. After all, art ennobles the spirit, ­elevates the mind, and educates the emotions. Or does it? In fact, tremendous irony attends our culture’s continuing investment—emotional, financial, and social—in art. We behave as if . . . . Continue Reading »

Some books are like barometers: interesting chiefly for what they tell us about the prevailing climate. Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism is a case in point. Readers who care about literary modernism will find little to detain them in this book. The names of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage By Paul Johnson HarperCollins, 216 pages, $24 suspect that most readers will be at least distantly familiar with the British historian and journalist Paul Johnson. Not only is he an amazingly prolific journalist, writing week in and week out on any number of . . . . Continue Reading »

Anyone seeking a vivid illustration of the proposition that an expensive education is no barrier to stupidity will wish to consult John Carey’s new book, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 . Not that the book lacks learning, . . . . Continue Reading »

We live at an odd moment. One mark of that oddness is the corruption of words that name important virtues. “Diversity,” for example, these days often turns out to be little more than a code word for intellectual gerrymandering, while “tolerance” appears largely as a synonym for . . . . Continue Reading »