Amy Coney Barrett seems headed for confirmation to the Supreme Court, and I’m very much among those celebrating. But everyone... Read More
About halfway through “Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy,” Talia Lavin introduces Tommy... Read More
Not that the aforementioned glamour and glory, wealth and wellness aren’t real. But they’re only part of the story—the... Read More
This is not a book, but rather an Atlantic essay puffed into a $25 sale item with grotesquely large type and comically wide... Read More
Many, I’d imagine, would be intimidated by a 960-page book on the Napoleonic era. Or perhaps they’d be uninterested, thinking the... Read More
The reliable flow of information is arguably one of the most essential battlegrounds in the fight to stabilize democracies around the world.... Read More
Was thomas jefferson an atheist? Plenty of people thought so. Jefferson never identified himself as such, of course. But it was his... Read More
On the eve of the Ides of March, Julius Caesar dined with his friend and ally Decimus Brutus, a distant relation of the more famous Marcus... Read More
As an oenophile loves wine, Don DeLillo loves words. To read his fiction—18 novels and novellas with the appearance of “The... Read More
Early March 2020 saw the publication of a remarkable book on a shamefully neglected subject: the brutality visited on millions of... Read More
Over the past twenty years, New York Review Books has gained a well-deserved reputation for saving great novels from oblivion, having... Read More
The battle lines in the supposed war between reason and tradition, science and faith, in the 18th and 19th centuries are a fitting entry... Read More
No writer understood loneliness better than Chekhov. People long for understanding, and try to confide their feelings, but more often than... Read More
When the Beatles’ first authorized biographer, Hunter Davies, clinched the deal in 1967, his publisher remarked that ‘we know... Read More
It was about fifteen years ago, I believe, that I first became aware that “classical liberalism” was a term that could be used to... Read More
The average person may be forgiven for thinking that the South actually won the Civil War. Despite a brief experiment in interracial... Read More
The Founding Fathers of America eloquently expressed the high‐minded ideals “all men are created equal.” At the same time,... Read More
By now we know what to expect from a presidential memoir: a doorstop of a book, with just enough tidbits to justify the multi-million-dollar... Read More
Für dich, Tommy, ist der Krieg vorbei. However, many British servicemen, officers especially, didn’t want their war to be over.... Read More
SOME WRITERS LAY undisputed claim to a territory, geographical and otherwise, and thus discourage rivals from trespassing. Early 20th-century... Read More
A permeating paranoia. Profound absurdity. Conspiracy and terrorism. Technological alienation. Violence bubbling, ready to boil. This has... Read More
In 2013, when I was first asked by Agatha Christie’s family to write a new Hercule Poirot mystery (I have since written three more), I... Read More
It happens surprisingly—for publishing executives, dismayingly—often. Two authors, each presumably unaware of the other’s... Read More
In the fall of 1935, the lyricist Sammy Cahn was hired to write songs for his boyhood hero, Louis Armstrong. The songs were to be a part of... Read More
Lions are special. The king of beasts, they are at the top of the list of must-see animals for many visiting Africa. But, as Michael... Read More
SOME WRITERS LAY undisputed claim to a territory, geographical and otherwise, and thus discourage rivals from trespassing. Early 20th-century Alexandria, Egypt, belongs to Cavafy. Dublin, Ireland, of course, is Joyce’s; as Albany, New York, is William Kennedy’s. The coastal region of Liguria in Northwestern Italy is inarguably Eugenio Montale’s proprietary realm; its sea and sunlight are his... Read More
Connoisseurs of the history of American conservatism will recall that Russell Kirk first proposed to Henry Regnery that his book ultimately titled The Conservative Mind be called, instead, The Conservative Rout. Consult your own feelings about today’s world, dear reader, and reflect with the wise author of Ecclesiastes that truly there is no new thing under the sun. If Kirk could feel, circa ... Read More
It was about fifteen years ago, I believe, that I first became aware that “classical liberalism” was a term that could be used to describe a contemporary movement of ideas. Up to that point, I had been teaching about classical liberalism only as a moment in Anglo-American political and economic thought extending roughly from John Locke and Adam Smith to the early 20th century. After the 1920s ... Read More
In America today, right is wrong, men are women, 2+2=5, and the truth as we all understood it is over. What happened? In his philosophic survival guide for our postmodern age,
