Reviews and News:
Theodore Rousseau, “Western art history’s Precursor in Chief.”
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In praise of minor literature: “Even the masterpieces we haven’t opened yet come to us pre-read. They belong to the world. Minor books, meanwhile, even those that are widely appreciated, seem to belong to us alone.”
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Terry Eastland reviews John Shelton Reed’s Barbecue.
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A. M. Juster’s Sleaze & Slander is wise, acerbic, and funny. It also contains some of the best translations of Martial’s epigrams in English. Here’s my review in this weekend’s Free Beacon.
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In Case You Missed It:
Dante’s Divine Comedy is a great work of art and the product of “vicious factionalism.”
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An even-handed life of Evelyn Waugh: “Unexpectedly, yet perhaps inevitably, Evelyn Waugh is becoming more likeable as the years go by. Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet-brandishing, banana-gobbling bigot is slowly becoming, in distant memory and from a comfortable distance, a bit of an old sweetheart. The more one reads about him, the more one likes him. Even the banana incident – shortly after the Second World War he ate three precious, strictly rationed bananas intended for his children in front of them, an act that his son Auberon famously found difficult to forgive and even more difficult to stop talking about – seems in retrospect as much a prank as an act of pure unpleasantness, more jolly jape than great evil. Weren’t all 20th-century bourgeois bohemian families equally brutish and strange? That’s certainly what all the books and biographies seem to suggest, isn’t it? And where’s the harm in a bit of a teasing – the children all get over it in the end, don’t they? Auberon’s son Alexander unearthed some years ago a letter from Auberon to Evelyn, never sent, which certainly suggests that even Auberon didn’t really begrudge his old man his eccentricities. The letter begins, ‘Dear Papa, Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any other man in the world.'”
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Cynthia Ozick on Saul Bellow’s letters: “The mandarin-poolroom link, elevated riffs married to street vernacular, has become Bellow’s signature, and attracts lovestruck imitators. Yet brilliant flourishes alone, even when embedded in galloping ambition, will not make a second Bellow. (A second Bellow? Not for a hundred years!) There is instead something else, beyond the heated braininess and lavish command of ideas: call it feeling.”
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Jonah Lehrer’s “insolently unoriginal” book on love: “Jonah Lehrer has had time to work on A Book About Love. His schedule no longer teems with lucrative speaking engagements. He no longer writes for The New Yorker or contributes to ‘Radiolab’ on NPR. With this project — his shot at redemption, provided to him by Simon & Schuster after his public tumble from grace — Mr. Lehrer could have written something complex and considered. Books are still the slow food of the publishing business. Yet here is Mr. Lehrer, once again, serving us a nonfiction McMuffin.”
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Classic Essay: Robert H. Bork, “Conservatism and the Culture”
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Interview: Stig Abell talks with Thea Lenarduzzi about Athelstan, Britain’s forgotten king, and Mary Beard about direct democracy in ancient Greece and Rome.
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