Frank Kermode began his excellent review of this fat and feisty volume with a statement that is at once factual and wildly misleading: “Sir Victor Pritchett is a Victorian.” To be sure, Pritchett was born in 1900, when the Good Queen still sat on the throne and the sun never set on the empire, a...
Just what is “Neoconservative Criticism“? What gives it any particular essence or distinguishes it from other brands being bartered in bookstores and newsstands throughout the Republic? The wiseacre might answer that it is the kind of criticism practiced by neoconservatives, and thus leave us where we began—that is, in the dark. Which is just about...
In this little “Memoir of Madness,” first delivered in abbreviated form at a symposium on affective disorders sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and then greatly expanded for publication in Vanity Fair, William Styron recounts, and attempts to account for, his descent into a mental depression that...
“The high-minded man must care more for truth than for what people think.” —Aristotle While being interviewed on William Buckley’s Firing Line, Harry Ashmore remarked that he had allowed the subject of his Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins to tell the story of his life and work through the numerous quotations that...
Nearly thirty years after his death in 1962, Robinson Jeffers occupies a secure niche in the pantheon of American poets. I suspect, indeed, that his place may well be the most secure of all. He has long since weathered the storm of disapproval that centered on his prophetic verse written before, during, and after World...