Heralding the End of War
In 1816, as Europe emerged from 20 years of war and revolution, the French political theorist Benjamin Constant wrote an essay comparing ancient and modern ideas of liberty. The modern European...
View ArticleAmong The Dead
The greatest poem about the Civil War doesn't mention North or South, slavery or secession. Walt Whitman knew about all these things, of course; many of the poems in "Drum-Taps," the collection he...
View ArticleIn Praise Of Fine Language
Should we trust eloquence? As we enter another presidential election year, with its quadrennial reminder that eloquence has all but disappeared from American politics, this may sound like a purely...
View ArticleNative Son
Literary biography is a genre that it is always safe to disdain; everyone knows the charges regularly brought against it by its accusers. Gossip about a writer's misbehavior distracts us from the...
View ArticleWhen Civilizations Clashed
How far back in history do you have to go before it stops making sense to take sides? Even today, it is impossible for an American to read about the Civil War or the American Revolution without...
View ArticleThe Imperial Appetite
In 1860, at the climax of the Second Opium War, a joint English and French army marched on Peking and burned the imperial summer palace to the ground. It was the most dramatic possible demonstration of...
View ArticleBrave New World
In 1938, five years before his death, Max Reinhardt directed the Thornton Wilder play "The Merchant of Yonkers" on Broadway. Back home in Germany, Reinhardt's visionary productions had made him one of...
View ArticleArabian Knights
In the old days, if you were an ambitious young Englishman looking for adventure and glory, your career path was obvious: You became a servant of the British Empire. The memoirs of George Orwell and...
View ArticleCuddling Up With the Celtic Tiger
When you consider how large a place Ireland occupies in our cultural imagination, it's astonishing to realize how small a country it really is. Its current population is slightly more than 4 million;...
View ArticleObama Bests Clinton At Craft of Writing
When Democratic primary voters go to the polls tomorrow in Ohio and Texas, it's a safe bet that few will be casting their votes based on senators Clinton's and Obama's merits as writers. To judge a...
View ArticleSearching For Joseph Conrad
It takes a perverse kind of ingenuity to make a boring book out of Joseph Conrad's life. After all, it's hard to think of a novelist whose career was as adventurous as Conrad's, or whose work raises...
View ArticleWar Games
Even a book as bad as "Human Smoke" (Simon and Schuster, 576 pages, $30), Nicholson Baker's perverse tract about the origins of World War II, helps to confirm the continuing centrality of that war in...
View ArticleA Convergence Of Civilizations
"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, / Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat." Anthony Pagden doesn't quote Kipling's famous lines in "Worlds...
View ArticleThe Writing Man's Burden
If there is one area in which British literary journalists definitely exceed their American cousins, it is in the whipping up of degradingly personal scandals. And whenever such a scandal erupts, it is...
View ArticleThose Who Do Know the Past
In the sixth century, Bishop Gregory of Tours began his "Histories" with the observation, "A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad." This is, as John Burrow writes in "A...
View ArticleThe Stern German
Walking near the Metropolitan Museum not long ago, I saw a young man, about the right age for a graduate student, wearing a T-shirt that declared "I ♥ Adorno." I'm not sure how ironically the slogan...
View ArticleNature's Keepers
There are many alarming documents in "American Earth" (1,048 pages, $40), the Library of America's new anthology of "environmental writing since Thoreau." The main purpose of environmental writing,...
View ArticleDavid Yezzi and Adam Zagajewski: Songs of Innocence and Experience
April is National Poetry Month, the poetry world's annual effort to soothe its bad conscience about practicing a minority art in a democratic culture. Institutional attempts to make more people read...
View ArticleSusan Neiman's Metaphysics of Morals
One thing I feel I should be clear about up front: I have always liked "Beavis and Butt-Head." You might not expect that a fondness for the 1990s MTV cartoon series, with its grunting, cretinous...
View ArticlePulling Back the Curtain on Hergé
Near the end of "Tintin and the Secret of Literature" (Counterpoint, 212 pages, $15.95), Tom McCarthy invokes the French radical theorist Guy Debord's notion of "detournement," "the taking over of a...
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