Year: 2005

This sprawling and densely written 400-page study of Southern political thought, from Old Republicans John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke down to Whig social theorists (and humorists) John Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper—with wedged-in discussions of such other Southern luminaries as Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, St. George Tucker, William Gilmore Simms, and...

If every man is worthy of a biography (as Johnson suggested), then every people, no matter how small, deserves a decent one-volume history that makes the story of the Bretons or the Armenians intelligible to foreigners.  That is the admirable purpose of Blackwell’s “The Peoples of Europe” series, which presents the “usually turbulent history” of...

Richard Wilbur’s long and distinguished writing career demonstrates that a poet can go against literary fashions, shunning what passes for received wisdom, and still earn critical praise and become an important figure on the literary landscape.  Few of his contemporaries have accomplished even part of what he has managed: to produce work of outstanding quality,...

“E avanti a lui, tremava tutta Roma!” —Victorien Sardou, Luigi Illica, and Guiseppe Giacosa, Tosca At the time of its publication in 1984, John Lukacs’s Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century was recognized by discerning critics as a highly significant work combining a fresh originality, at once topical and...

If we wish to understand and profit from a great artist, the essential thing to grasp is his vision, as unfolded in his work.  Much less important is something that, unlike the God-given vision, he shares with all of us—his opinions.  Still, the opinions of a creative writer with the societal breadth and historical depth...

There is a scene in Oliver Stone’s powerful and haunting antiwar film Born on the Fourth of July (1989), in which Ron Kovic’s mother is bending down before the television (this is B.R.—before the remote) and wincing.  It is the Fourth of July, 1969, and long-haired antiwar protesters are surging through the capital with angry...

Paul Franco, a professor of government at Bowdoin College, describes his book on English political theorist Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) as an “introduction.”  That modest claim is fully justified in light of the many volumes on politics, philosophy, aesthetics, education, and religion that Franco’s subject left behind in his productive life of 89 years.  Franco observes...

Henry Timrod died in 1867 at the age of 39 from tuberculosis—his end aggravated and hastened by inadequate food and the rigors of eking out a living amidst the charred ruins of South Carolina’s capital city.  The newspaper that had provided the only income for himself, his wife, his child, and his widowed sister’s large...