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Ananyo Bhattacharya The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. W. W. Norton, 368 pages, $30 The life of John von Neumann can only be called [...]

Dozens of Donnes Katherine Rundell Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $30 I wish I had thought of the tide of diis review, but [...]

Mark Eden Horowitz, editor The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II. Oxford University' Press, 1,088 pages, $39-95 Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960) was the most important figure behind the creation of one [...]

Textbooks do not usually change the world. After all, compilations of established wisdom cannot easily serve as manifestos for change. But Paul Samuelson's textbook Economics was an exception to the [...]

The whole aim of politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of [...]

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in two of the most important cases involving racial preferences in recent memory. Both involve race-based admissions programs that discriminate against Asian American [...]

The most merciful thing in the world, wrote H. P. Lovecraft, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents. Likewise, the most powerful advantage of [...]

God save the Queen, because nobody else will. Elizabeth Windsor of Windsor Castle, Windsor, passed her ninety-sixth birthday in April. She was born in 1926, when monarchy was an endangered [...]

Christopher Prendergast Living and Dying with Marcel Proust. Europa, 256 pages, $17 The year 2022 marks a notable double centenary. It is one hundred years since Marcel Proust died and [...]

Editors' note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for the annual Barnes--de Mazia Lecture at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, on May 10, 2022. I've been going to [...]

Virginia Woolf was a snob. Her attacks on the English novelist, playwright, editor, and critic Arnold Bennett were rooted not in literary merit, but in social class. This becomes especially [...]

The word risorgimento translates into English as 'resurgence' or 'rebirth,' but in Italian, it is invariably written with a capital R and, as such, refers specifically to a series of [...]

When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature, had trouble getting the third part of The Quiet Don approved for publication, he appealed to Maxim [...]

The rage of the totalitarian state never ebbs, but the pace at which it kills can vary, sometimes being spasms of spontaneous-seeming violence, sometimes a slower, relentless closing of the [...]

The distinguished tradition of art, literature, and philosophy that has defined the Western world for more than two millennia is collapsing almost everywhere. It has been abandoned in the colleges, [...]

We don't often hear about the plight of the overclass, but our progressive elites have a problem. They have become too successful, and their success is starting to show poorly. [...]

Scrutonian selections Roger Scruton, edited by Mark Dooley Against the Tide: The Best of Roger Scruton's Columns, Commentaries and Criticism. Bloomsbury, 242 pages, $28 Most great men have a dip [...]

Half a century ago Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel recorded a song based upon the poem 'Richard Cory.' If Simon had not written the song, maybe no one under the [...]

Stephen Budiansky Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Godel. W. W. Norton, 368 pages, $30 Best Known Modern Mathematician is not a hotly contested title. John [...]

Editors' note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at the Coolidge Foundation's annual New York Dinner on December 7, 2021. How remarkable it is that many young [...]

The current moment may seem to be a crossroads. Western civilization may either continue to lose its apparent competitive superiority over its chief rivals, or it may reaffirm its enduring [...]

When Stephen Sondheim died on November 26 of last year, the news came as a surprise. Though ninety-one, the composer-lyricist was seemingly in good health, had given a ninety-minute interview [...]

The Beefsteak club is one of London's more exclusive. Concealed behind an anonymous door in the insalubrious vicinity of Leicester Square, it occupies one room up a flight of stairs, [...]

As for the West, it is a land of sleep; darkness weighs on the place where the dead dwell. --Taimhotep, funerary stela, ca. 45 B.C. Un homme qui dort tient [...]

The abdicator Andrew Lownie Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke & Duchess of Windsor. Pegasus, 432 pages, $19.95 Does anyone want to read yet another book about the [...]

When it comes to collecting and exhibiting works of art and culture, not enough gets said about private associations. Beyond the public museum and the commercial gallery, these associations can [...]

One day last June, my eye fell upon the headline to a New York Times column by Paul Krugman--as sometimes happens in spite of my best efforts, for the sake [...]

In May 1926, the British General Council of the Trades Union Congress called a 'general strike' to attempt to force the Conservative government, led by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, to [...]

The last time I visited Coventry was as a witness in the trial of a man with a tattoo on his neck who had strangled his girlfriend in a fit [...]

Statisticians have long been telling us how steeply the life-expectancy curve continues to rise. As a result, receiving an invitation to a one-hundredth birthday party, although surprising, is not necessarily [...]

The theme is 'Western civilization at the crossroads.' Far be it from me to doubt that the West is on the precipice of something enormous. But 'crossroads' implies a map. [...]

Along with his contemporary Alexander Calder, George Rickey (1907-2002) is the artist most associated with motion in sculpture. Only of late has he not been much in the public eye. [...]

The ways in which the progressive mind responds to realities that challenge its most profound beliefs provide an enduring source of fascination. One response is to lay claim to the [...]

Remember way, way back, five or six months ago, when you couldn't read a news story about Donald Trump's challenge to last year's election results without its being qualified, usually [...]

'Frans Hals' The National Gallery, London. September 30, 2023-January 21, 2024 Frans Hals (1582-1666) is often at the mercy of a value judgment that places him below Vermeer and Rembrandt. [...]

The modern age in arms Halik Kochanski Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945. Liveright, 960 pages, $45 Peace and stability in Europe, as Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor [...]

This year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Moliere, sometimes called France's Shakespeare, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in January 1622 in the center of Paris. France has recently been [...]

Gordon S. Wood Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution. Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $24.95 It is often said that the United States and Great Britain are two [...]

Classics is not just an abstraction of values, legacies, literature, and history. Whether it comes alive or stays moribund in the modern age hinges on the success or failure of [...]

Michael Dobbs King Richard: Nixon and Watergate--An American Tragedy. Knopf, 416 pages, $32.50 Michael Dobbs's King Richard is a superficial book that contributes nothing new to the immense Watergate literature, [...]

In death as in life, it has been the unhappy fate of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-75) to be overshadowed by her compatriot and contemporary Henry Moore--by the size of [...]

Simon Fenwick The Crichel Boys: Scenes from England's Last Literary Salon. Constable, 368 pages, 25 [pounds sterling] For several decades after the Second World War, a former rectory in Long [...]

About the only fact that the non-fan ever remembers about the career of Barbara Pym (1913-80) is its abrupt truncation in 1963. The news came in a letter from the [...]

Is it just me, or are lots of people in the new normal of post-Trump America asking themselves if it is just them? Does anyone else scan the headlines and [...]

In 1969, the hundredth anniversary of Hector Berlioz's death, the Association nationale Hector Berlioz began sponsoring a critical edition of die composer's writings. The first part of the project finished [...]

Michael Keen & Joel Slemrod Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages. Princeton University Press, 536 pages, $29.95 When in 88 B.C. Mithridates the Great ordered [...]

Writing a few years after the armistice that, at 11 o'clock on November 11, 1918, brought a halt to the fighting on the Western Front, John Buchan related how: At [...]

Eight plus eight is sixteen. Easy to remember. And it was on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2016, a date that will live in media infamy, that [...]

David R. Godine Godine at Fifty: A Retrospective of Five Decades in the Life of an Independent Publisher. Godine, 292 pages, $50 In my library, there's a lovely little volume [...]

Charles Seife Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity. Basic Books, 400 pages, $30 The tide of this book is so extremely clever that one suspects that someone would [...]