One of academia’s most important contributions to society was its ability to set issues that arose in the narrow context of present-day... Read More

Word is out on the street: the study of literature is dying; English is breathing its last; no more Beowulf, no more Virginia Woolf... Read More

Iain Murray’s The Socialist Temptation is a helpful, timely resource most appropriate for those who already know that... Read More

I had my first doubts about Lord Hall, the former director-general of the BBC, when he addressed a group of us BBC editors back in about 1999... Read More

Consider the following scenario. You are approached by a young writer who tells you that they are writing what they hope to be the great... Read More

Richard Kreitner’s book potentially has a very short shelf life. If Joe Biden wins in November, the arguments of this left-wing... Read More

As the world faces an existential crisis–climate change, not the global coronavirus pandemic–it is fitting that Noam Chomsky,... Read More

Archaeology, Kipling observed, “furnishes a scholarly pursuit with all the excitement of a gold prospector’s life.”... Read More

“The world is awash with bullshit, and we’re drowning in it,” Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D.... Read More

Just after the opening credits of Gone with the Wind and before the start of the film proper is a title card that reads as follows... Read More

In 176 BC a strange but revealing murder case came before the Roman praetor, M. Popillius Laenas. A woman, unnamed in the sources, was... Read More

It was 1984 — in real life, not the book. My family and I were living in West Berlin, where I was beginning to write “The... Read More

David Pryce-Jones had a front-row seat from which to observe postwar Europe’s literary and political upheavals. The well-connected son... Read More

It would hardly have surprised Christopher Hitchens, his unsanguine views of the afterlife under no bushel, that among the trials and... Read More

Probably, when one hears the phrase “the classical tradition,” the first name that comes to mind is not “Iggy... Read More

There aren’t many books out there these days by revolutionary communists who are into the genetics of intelligence. But then there... Read More

All that Fredrik deBoer wants us to do is concede that not everyone can be above average. That’s just the nature of statistics, its... Read More

These two best-selling books about racism—White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, and How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X.... Read More

Some excellent books have been written on the separate—and seemingly unrelated—issues of taming the administrative state,... Read More

Prudence was the watchword of Edmund Burke, the great 18th-century Irish statesman, except where his own money was concerned. The... Read More

Daniel Todman certainly can write. Academic historians have handed down a raft of doorstopper volumes on Britain’s role in destroying... Read More

Wagner gave his name to a movement that is also a contagious malaise and in surveying a Wagnerised world Alex Ross looks far beyond the... Read More

William Blake’s childhood vision on Peckham Rye is well known. Sauntering along, he looks up and, according to an early biographer,... Read More

The outbreak of the pandemic, so the denizens of literary Twitter never tired of reminding us, was a terrible time to have a book coming... Read More

Where to begin? I am sitting at a desk, looking at a first edition of Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, and looking out... Read More