Peggy Noonan’s new volume The Time of Our Lives brings together some of the columnist’s greatest hits. She writes about the peaceful 1990s, the shock of September 11, what it’s like to write a major speech for a president in time of crisis (in this case, Ronald Reagan’s Challenger speech), and many other aspects of American (and indeed Western) culture.

Noonan has for a long time been one of the best at describing the background milieu in which we live out our respective three score and ten. She seems constantly to be asking the simplest questions: What are people doing? What do their actions mean? Asking the simplest questions does not mean that her analyses are simple. Indeed, she sees the world the way that one reads a novel. Her description of Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign sounds as if Jane Austen had set the scene: “[he] always seems alone out there, a guy with a mic pacing an empty stage. All by himself, removed from the other humans. It’s sad-looking. It’s not working.”