Category: View

28 / CHRONICLESnAN ELEGY TO A WRITER by Mildred HardingnPearl Craigie, the long forgotten novelist and playwrightn”John Oliver Hobbes,” who died in 1906, is due fornresurrection.nShe has haunted me for over 40 years. It was through mynstudy of the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore in the 1940’sn(particularly through Joseph Hone’s biography of him), thatnMrs. Craigie first...

DOGGEREL IN A GOOD CAUSE by Auberon WaughnAs editor of the Literary Review, I am afraid I havenformed rather a low opinion of the nation’s poets.nEvery week 20 or 30 offerings arrive through the post, and Inoften glance at them before handing them over to thenmagazine’s saintly, long-suffering poetry editor. Withnamazingly few exceptions, these “poems”...

10 / CHRONICLESnVIEWSnTHE LATIN INVASIONS OF ENGLISHnby E. Christian Kopffn”When all is said and done, soniething sticks innthe Barbarians.”n—Rudyard KiplingnWe need a practical education, an education that willnbe valid in the unforeseen and unforeseeable future.nThere are many possible forms, but all must includenmathematics and Latin. Of the 100 most commonly usednwords in English, only 10...

16 I CHRONICLESnTHE EVIL THAT MEN DON’T DO:nJOE MCCARTHY AND THE AMERICANnRIGHT by Samuel T. FrancisnHis is probably the most hated name in Americannhistory. Other villains—Benedict Arnold, AaronnBurr, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—today evokenmerely the esoteric passions of the antiquarian or theninterminable controversies of partisans. Only Joe McCarthynhas given his name to an enduring...

VIEWSnTHE PROMISE OF LIFEn”Give them hope, so they may fear.”n—The ApocryphanThere is no more Atlantis.n”Where,” I was asked in prison, by a Yugoslav StatenSecurity agent, “is this Atlantis you would like to live in,nSelic?” I didn’t tell him that I wanted to live in America, itnbeing alive and well, and still above the waters.n”How many...

idealism and good deeds that saw blaclisnfreed, poverty rediscovered, womennawakened, sexual inhibitions cast oflF, anwar machine foiled, and an evil presidentntoppled.nIt profits one little to decry thenmythmaking process; the left will havenits myths and the flood of memoirs,nnovels, journalistic accounts, andnpseudo-histories of the 60’s will notnrecede until the left has either exhaustednitself in an orgy...

courageous woman” and her poetry asn”a triumphant event in our literature.”nStill, the spectacle of Sexton’s emotionalnbreakdown and suicide is not an attractivenone. Because the artists who formulatednOates’s credo envisioned only “thisnworld … rendered in all its detail, withnno more revulsion for the contradictory,nthe obscene, the vulgar, the unspeakable,nthan any anthropologist or chemist mightnfeel confronted with...