Author: Chilton Williamson (Chilton Williamson)

De Gaulle, by Julian Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard; 928 pp., $39.95).  Here is no doubt the best, most comprehensive, most politically balanced and appropriately distanced of the now four notable biographies of Charles de Gaulle.  Previously, those by Jean Lacouture (1985-88), Paul-Marie de La Gorce (1967, rev. 1999), and Éric Roussel took pride...

In its issue for December 20, 2018, the New York Review of Books published an essay by Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, titled “Two Roads for the New French Right.”  The piece caught the attention of many American conservatives—I personally received a number of emails drawing my attention to it, all by people...

The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics, by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler (New York: Basic Books; 448 pp., $32.00).  Andrew Jackson ran for President in 1824 and was defeated by John Quincy Adams, the son of former President John Adams.  In 1828 he tried again and...

Seeking relief from the midterm madness, I’ve been rereading H.L. Mencken’s political reportage and commentary, selections from which have been published in most Mencken anthologies.  Up to Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for a second presidential term, American politics was still enjoyable—bitter though many campaigns in the 19th century were, especially as the War Between the States...

A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera, by Vivien Schweit-zer (New York: Basic Books; 288 pp., $27.00).  I need to be fair to this book, because the author, a concert pianist and writer who worked for a decade as a classical-music critic for the New York Times, certainly knows her stuff so far as opera...

As a means to a brief escape from the (so far) miserable 21st century I picked up and began reading The Reason Why, an excellent work of nonacademic history published in 1953 by Cecil Woodham-Smith (in England, the sexes share the name “Cecil,” as they do “Evelyn”) that tells the background story of the famous...

Not only is Father Rutler one of the most brilliant priests in the country; he is also one of the finest writers of the English language today.  In this collection of predominantly short essays, many or most of them reprinted or adapted from Crisis Magazine, he shows to his absolute best.  His elegant and rather...

Of all the epithets Donald Trump has delivered over the last 24 months (“Mexican immigrant thieves and rapists,” “shithole countries,” the “Mueller Witch Hunt,” etc.), none has provoked greater outrage on the part of liberals than his characterization of the media as “enemies of the people”—the media themselves included.  But just as Trump never characterized...

Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was one of the most important philosophers and authors of the 20th century.  Camus called him, “after Nietzsche, . . . perhaps the greatest ‘European writer.’”  Yet he is virtually unknown today, and scarcely ever read, or even referred to or quoted.  One needn’t read far in any of his many...

“The conscience of the Senate”: Senator Jeff Flake (R-Az) on Senator John (“Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb bomb-bomb Iran”) McCain. Add to Favorites

Chronicles and The Rockford Institute have sustained a dreadful personal and institutional loss with the death of our dear friend and irreplaceable contributor Claude Polin, who died early on the morning of July 23 at his flat in Paris in the presence of his beloved wife, Nancy.  He had been ill for several years, during...