Reviews and News:
A history of fighting in England: The “southern counties of medieval England were more dangerous than Mexico today – and four times as dangerous as the United States.”
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The new social realists: “Modern art has become obsessed with identity politics at the expense of beauty and form.”
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New image of Davy Crockett discovered in Fort Worth museum.
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Katherine A. Powers reviews John Pipkin’s The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter.
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In Case You MIssed It:
The ethics of table manners: “The more you think about those around you and the less you think about yourself, the more likely you are to behave well.”
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The morality of Cormac McCarthy’s misfits
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Colley Cibber reconsidered: “Colley Cibber was unfortunate in his enemies. Alexander Pope made him King of the Dunces in The Dunciad, Henry Fielding pilloried him in the opening chapter of Joseph Andrews and in a number of plays, and Samuel Johnson ridiculed him. Posterity has paid more attention to the mockery of these great writers than to Cibber’s undoubted – and rather extraordinary – achievements. Elaine McGirr’s Partial Histories is an impassioned and unashamedly partisan attempt at reclamation.”
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Dwight Garner on Marina Abramovic’s pretentious memoir: “I knew I was going to dislike Ms. Abramovic’s memoir on Page 10. That’s where she declares that, as a child growing up in postwar Yugoslavia, she didn’t play with dolls or toys. Instead, she writes, in a passage that sets this book’s tone of sleek, international, Bono-level pretentiousness, ‘I preferred to play with the shadows of passing cars on the wall.'”
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Classic Essay: Henry Regnery, “Eliot, Pound, and Lewis: A Creative Friendship”
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Interview: Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, talks to Spiked about why he won’t use students’ preferred gender pronouns.
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