Reviews and News:
The difficult Jonathan Swift: “‘Would we have liked to live with him?’ asked Thackeray, contemplating Swift, a question he immediately ducked by supplying a long list of other writers with whom we might prefer to spend our time. Samuel Johnson, similarly recoiling from the evidence of Swift’s character as manifested in his works, thought him ‘a man of rigorous temper’, whose ‘vigilance of minute attention’ must have made him unbearable. Even his best friends, on whose testimony Johnson relied, depicted him as cold, frugal, petulant and severe. None of this would have surprised the man himself.”
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The unsentimental education of English girls: “Ysenda Maxtone Graham delights in the jolly-hockey-sticks world of girls’ boarding schools — where the chief lesson learnt was how to survive a dull marriage.”
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In Case You Missed It:
Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories: “Odessa in pre-Soviet days may have been a region of mythic heroes, who share something of the amoral vigor of the bandits and warriors of folklore, but it also hosted a plundered populace. A city run by bandits is a paradise for no one but the strong. Still, compared to the regime that pacified the city, old Odessa may not have been so bad after all. The Soviet government rooted out corruption and crime, but it also cracked down on religion and innocent customs, reorganizing here as everywhere according to the blunt dictates of unnuanced rationality.”
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How James Bond got his name.
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Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is “a novel that showcases its author’s formidable talents in only half its pages, while bogging down the rest of the time in formulaic and predictable storytelling.”
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What’s wrong with Vox? Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, explains in devastating detail.
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Classic Essay: Aaron Wildavsky, “Is Culture the Culprit?”
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Interview: John J. Miller talks to Melanie Kirkpatrick about Thanksgiving.
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