Come down the Danube through a “painters’ paradise” of low hills, past a “bosky island,” around a bend where suddenly the spires and parapets and bustling quays spread before you “in a pearly, blue-gray light.” Glimpse the Royal Castle, its cupola “studded with stony warts, a suggestion of an old Magyar warrior’s semibarbaric helmet.” Debark...
Author: Paul T. Hornak (Paul T. Hornak)
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An American Burke
John Randolph (1773-1833) survives in America’s footnotes as a colorful contrarian, and the Gore Vidal school of historiography pants at his duel with Henry Clay and his taste for opium. A master rhetorician, he left a long list of choice barbs, nearly all concocted on the spur of the moment. James Kilpatrick characterized the errant...
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Children of Fortune
“Each social class has its own pathology.” —Proust Going by the tide and subtitle alone, it would appear that this is either a book about the lies rich people tell each other, or a book transforming the jingle of coins into the crash of magical cymbals. Having read it through, I am happy to report...