Reviews and News:
The great Robert Hughes: “The most manifest virtue of these essays is their language, marked by an uncommon command of vocabulary and (in our day) a far rarer mastery of syntax, allied to a thoroughly antiquated respect for the rules of grammar. Open this anthology anywhere and you will be hard put to find a sentence that is not as memorable for its very phrasing as it is for its thought.”
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Teddy Roosevelt was the ultimate “cowboy President.” He was also a committed scientist, scholar, and adventurer.
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Clint Hill, who was the sole Secret Service agent to run towards JFK after he was shot, writes about his experiences serving five presidents.
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Lenin’s four-ton head goes on display in Berlin.
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Aubrey Beardsley was the art editor and cover artist for Yellow Book and illustrator of the English edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. “Nothing was so shocking as his boldly massed images of fashionably dressed, elongated women disporting themselves in the modern metropolis – their lips full, their eyelids heavy, their motives dubious.”
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The resurrection of American communism.
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Essay of the Day:
Frontline – a London club for war correspondents – has become “a den of swagger and lefty self-regard” James Kirchick writes in Spectator:
“Standing recently outside the Frontline, a London club for foreign correspondents and their admirers, a female professor offered a cigarette to the veteran war reporter beside her. ‘Thank you,’ he said, narrowing his eyes like a character in a pulp movie, ‘but I only smoke when I’m under fire.’
“It’s the sort of self-mythologising line you hear all too often at the Frontline, where members preen like latter-day Hemingways amid lovingly curated war-reporting memorabilia — shrapnel-damaged cameras, scorched press cards, and so on — often in the admiring company of young freelancers and students.
“The Frontline is much more than just a hacks’ hangout; it hosts talks on foreign affairs, debates and book launches. My first visit occurred a decade ago, when I was a student at Yale spending a summer in London and a journalism professor urged me to check out the place. I don’t recall the exact topic of the panel discussion that evening (something about the Balkans), but I do remember the types who made up much of the audience: earnest, prone to bloviating and oneupmanship (judging by those asking questions from the floor), and with the kind of political views you encounter in the Guardian‘s Comment is Free section.
“The Frontline Club has been serving up braggadocio with a side of leftish politics since 2003. More recently, it became well-known as the London headquarters of the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, before he took up residence in the Ecuadorian embassy.”
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Image of the Day: Aurora over Sweden
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Poem: J. T. Barbarese, “Scatter”
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