Reviews and News:
Kevin Williamson explains why Macbeth is “a play for our times.”
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Frederick the Great’s father beat him and prevented him from learning Latin. But when he became king, he changed Prussia from a minor kingdom into one of Europe’s great powers. “Frederick proved himself every inch a king and, more, a passionate practitioner of realpolitik. In December 1740, he started the War of the Austrian Succession by invading the rich and populous Austrian province of Silesia, often personally commanding the troops. Silesia was but the first of his territorial acquisitions. Some were achieved by battle and some by artful diplomacy with such monarchs as Catherine the Great and Maria Teresa of Austria, with whom he peacefully divided large chunks of Polish territory in the First Partition of Poland in 1772.”
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When C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity was released in 1952 it was mostly ignored. It has sold 3.5 million copies in the past 16 years alone. What’s the book’s appeal?
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Orestes Brownson, constitutionalist: “Brownson’s voluminous writing, particularly on political theory, provides a clear and coherent set of philosophical principles that transcend his own times and have direct relevance to our predicament. He believed in applying the genius of the federal Constitution to revitalize America’s political life; restoring republican self-government while fending off rapacious private interests intent on plundering the public purse; and rebalancing state authority and individual liberty under the principle of man’s relational personhood, as revealed in his multi-dimensional social, familial, religious and economic life.”
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Edvard Munch’s anguished vision.
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Revisiting the brief reign of the bastard son of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici: “Alessandro was…a victim of the age in which he was born. The Medici heir, living when he did, had little chance of becoming the perfect sovereign, even in the hard-nosed incarnation outlined for his father by Machiavelli.”
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“John Quincy Adams is easy to admire, but difficult to like, much less love. Traub, whose books include The Freedom Agenda, recognizes this problem from the start and solves it by not trying.”
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Global Shakespeare: A few years ago, a young Afghan poet, Qais Akbar Omar, staged a production of Love’s Labour Lost in in Kabul. “The complex story of the mounting of the play is told in semifictionalized form in a 2015 book Omar coauthored with Stephen Landrigan, A Night in the Emperor’s Garden. Measured by the excitement it generated, this production of Love’s Labor’s Lost was a great success. The overflow crowds on the opening night gave way to ever-larger crowds clamoring to get in, along with worldwide press coverage.But the attention came at a high price. The Taliban took note of Shakespeare in Kabul and what it signified. In the wake of the production, virtually everyone involved in it began to receive menacing messages. Spouses, children, and the extended families of the actors were not exempt from harassment and warnings. The threats were not idle. The husband of one of the performers answered a loud knock on the door one night and did not return. His mutilated body was found the next morning.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Spectator, Gary Dexter explains what he learns about contemporary British tastes by reciting poetry on the street:
“Every so often you come across savants who know huge amounts of English poetry. But it’s never who you expect. I remember one young man, about 22, with a scarred face who requested ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. He was standing right next to a portable sound system playing very loud music, in a haze of marijuana fumes, drinking beer from a can. All this made declaiming Eliot’s nine-minute-long poem difficult, but every time I paused to recollect myself he’d prompt me with the correct words. I wouldn’t have been able to manage that on half a shandy.
“I have also discovered that there are a lot of English teachers living among us, wandering round looking like ordinary people. Some of my most memorable encounters have been with them:
“ME: Do you have a favourite poem?
“DRUNK ENGLISH TEACHER: Do you know ‘The Sick Rose’ by William Blake?
“ME: Yes. [recites]
“FRIEND OF DRUNK ENGLISH TEACHER: Was that right?
“DRUNK ENGLISH TEACHER: I can’t remember. And I was teaching it this morning.”
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Image of the Day: Thunderstorm
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Poem: Yahia Lababidi, “Arrivals”
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