In these two recent spy thrillers, William F. Buckley’s CIA-trained alter ego makes his sixth and seventh appearances in a decade to play a winning hand in the high-stakes intrigue surrounding crucial moments in the Cold War. On a secret
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Robert F. Geary
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Boredom, Sex, and Murder
” . . . knew every quirk within lust’s labyrinth and were professed critic in lechery.”
—Ben Jonson
Cracks are appearing in the idol of high culture fabricated by the Victorians. Matthew Arnold eloquently expressed the vision of the educated
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Paranoia as Prudence
‘Believing where we cannot prove.”
-Tennyson
Edith Efron: The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie: How Environmental Politics Controls What We Know About Cancer; Simon & Schuster; New York.
“Edith Efron would like to shake the cancer-fighting agencies to
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Trivial Spirits
Malcolm Bradbury: Rates of Exchange; Alfred A. Knopf; New York
Vassily Aksyonov: The Island of Crimea; Translated by Michael Henry Heim; Random House; New York.
Signs of massive political fatuity abound. In the face of more than a
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Horrors in the Age of Disbelief
Stephen King: Pet Sematary; Doubleday; New York.
If it is true that popular literature, in however unexamined a fashion, embodies many of the presuppositions of an age, then the last decade and a half’s spate of supernatural shockers raises
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Beyond the Public View
Tadeusz Konwicki: A Minor Apocalypse; Translated by Richard Lourie; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York.
Contemporary Poland, for many reasons, disquiets the West. To those who nurture visions of a painless and peaceful accord between the Soviets and the
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