Prufrock: The Vanishing Velazquez, the Cult of the Colossal, and More

Reviews and News:

Hitler’s artists: “Although it is a commonplace observation that artists tend to suffer under dictatorships, of the left and the right, it is nonetheless true that some have found ways of surviving and even flourishing under repressive regimes—largely through compromises that look egregious after the fact. This was particularly the case with the fascist states of the interwar period from 1919 to 1939.”

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Brian P. Kelly reviews Laura Cumming’s “fascinating” The Vanishing Velázquez. The book “is a double portrait, an account of the life and art of that greatest of Spanish painters, Diego Velázquez, and an exhumation of a forgotten art-loving bookseller, John Snare. Even more, it is a beautiful study in extremes: in the case of the artist, of a talent so astounding that Manet called him ‘the greatest painter there ever was,’ and in the case of the merchant, of a passion (or obsession, depending on your perspective) so intense that its pursuit would drive him to ruin.”

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Reconsidering Bohumil Hrabal’s 1965 Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult. According to Jacob Mikanowski in The Point, the collection is a “production novel” of sorts – “the signature literary form of the Stalinist era.” “The stories in Mr. Kafka comply outwardly with this form. Most take place at the Poldi steelworks, an immense factory complex (founded, in an odd twist of fate, by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s father) outside Prague where Hrabal worked for several years in the Fifties. They feature strikes, quotas and a constant interest in the mores of factory life. Yet they seethe with the unexpected, and they’re also frequently very funny. No other writer is better at finding the comic in the tragic, or the strange in the mundane, than Bohumil Hrabal.”

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How did Shakespeare die? Some say it was of fever, others say syphilis. Lloyd Evans examines the evidence in The Spectator.

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In Case You Missed It:

What’s the use of feminism today? Not much, according to Naomi Schaefer Riley: “if there were ever evidence that feminism is a set of useless tropes for young women today, Orenstein’s Girls and Sex is it, though Orenstein herself does not know it.”

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Mary Shelley among the radicals. “Mary Shelley understood, even as a very young woman, intuitively and imaginatively rather than discursively, that power without goodness is dangerous, that knowledge without ethics is ‘a cancer in the universe.'”

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A dramatic guide to fishing: “For charm, elegance, and sheer ease of reading, few books compare with The Compleat Angler. Only a minority of its millions of readers since the mid-17th century—it has been reprinted more than any book in our language save the Authorized Edition of the Bible.”

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Robert Lax’s ambition: “Lax—beloved friend of Thomas Merton, most gifted student of Mark Van Doren, early and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, and a man who could count E. B. White as a fan—suffered no shortage of ambition, but it was a profoundly unusual sort. Early on in their friendship he told Merton that ‘all he had to do to become a saint was to want to be one.’ Lax appears to have honored his own counsel.”

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Classic Essay: Wilhelm Röpke, “The Cult of the Colossal”

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Interview: John J. Miller talks with Tom Nolan about the novelist Ross Macdonald

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