Reviews and News:
Patrick Modiano’s deliberate obscurantism.
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Thomas Babington Macaulay reconsidered: “He was the most accomplished of the Whig intellectuals, the champions of middle-class liberalism as 19th-century England understood that word, of commercial values shot through with Protestant reasonableness, a species of godliness conducive to, not to say at the service of, worldly success and satisfaction.”
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In 1843, the painter Richard Dadd killed his father and left England for Austria, where he planned to assassinate Ferdinand I. He spent the remaining 42 years of his life in insane asylums, where he continued to paint.
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James Stoddard’s Evenmore trilogy is “a major work of Christian fantasy.”
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Svetlana Alexievich’s “astonishing” Secondhand Time.
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“It’s time to kill James Bond.”
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J. K. Rowling can’t let Harry Potter go.
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Aristotle and the “soulmate” view of marriage.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Henrik Bering revisits the paintings of Jacques Louis-David. He is “a great painter,” Bering argues, “but morally, he stinks”:
“‘Official’ propaganda art, we have all been taught, is crude and laughably primitive, invariably inferior to real art. Except, of course, when it isn’t. And here the career of Jacques-Louis David is highly instructive. David became France’s leading artist during the nation’s most turbulent period, first acting as the high priest of the Revolution, then switching horses to become the celebrator-in-chief of Napoleon. Through his ability to make the politically reprehensible appear attractive, David delivers the ultimate proof of the seductive power of art.”
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Image of the Day: The Karwendel
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Poem: William Logan, “Spring Bearing Arms”
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