“Life has the name of life but in reality it is death,” writes Heraclitus. No Bronx boy, even one who has celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday, has enough chutzpah to argue with that. Yet having survived to so ripe an age, I find that when it comes to death, I prefer a more American voice, . . . . Continue Reading »
Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds by philippe paquet translated by julie rose la trobe, 720 pages, $59.99 It is a curious fact that Communist dictatorships were at their most popular among Western intellectuals while they still had the courage of their brutality. Once they settled down to . . . . Continue Reading »
One Sunday in high school, we went to the Anglo-Catholic parish where my headmaster served as an assistant priest. Catechized by evangelical Episcopalians and Presbyterians, I believed that the Bible was divinely inspired by God. But I had never seen it treated as such in a physical or ritual way. . . . . Continue Reading »
Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisitedby philip eadehenry holt, 432 pages, $32 Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born in 1903 to upper-middle-class Anglicans who lived in a suburb of London. He attended a boarding secondary school (Lancing College), read history at Oxford, published his first book (a . . . . Continue Reading »
Allen Tate: The Modern Mind and the Discovery of Enduring Loveby john v. glass iiithe catholic university of america, 376 pages, $59.95 I well remember sitting up half the night annotating Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” in my Norton anthology. As do I remember reading for the first . . . . Continue Reading »
The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns, Volume I: Commonplace Books, Tour Journals, and Miscellaneous Proseedited by nigel n. leaskoxford, 512 pages, $200 Robert Burns, “Rabbie” to those who love him, sired thirty-six children with eighteen mistresses before dying of exhaustion at age . . . . Continue Reading »
The great poet of the Caribbean, Derek Walcott, passed away at home on his native island of St. Lucia on March 17. It is hard to summarize his achievement. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, most notably Omeros (1990), which transplants the Trojan War to the Caribbean fishing world . . . . Continue Reading »
After being displaced by detachment and suspicion, aesthetic pleasure may be making a comeback in criticism. Continue Reading »
Carmen Boullosa’s They’re Cows, We’re Pigs transforms a pirate adventure into a gripping meditation on utopia, embodiment, and brotherhood. Continue Reading »
Shakespeare in the Park reduced Julius Caesar from a morally complex political drama into a heavy-handed tale of progressivism. Continue Reading »
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