Books in Little
Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, by Nicholas Ostler (Walker & Company, 382 pp., 2007) Writing in the seventh century, St. Isidore of Seville observed that “peoples have arisen from languages, not languages from peoples.” The history of the Latin language, as...Donald Davidson and the South’s Conservatism
From The Politics of Prudence Leviathan is a Hebrew word signifying “that which gathers itself in folds.” In the Old Testament, Leviathan is the great sea-beast: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes—whom T.S. Eliot calls...
On the Fixing of Our Gaze
On Essays and LettersWhen college students go to Europe, as so many do, I tell them to be sure to send me a card from this place or that, places they visit, usually randomly. Moreover, I tell them before they depart that, on coming to Ostia Antica, the port of Rome,...
Hill’s Country
Contrary Country: A Chronicle of Vermont By Ralph Nading Hill. Rinehart & Company cloth, 1950 As a Vermont patriot first and academic second, I begin any professional volume by consulting the index. Is Vermont listed? When I first read Arnold Toynbee’s classic A...
More than Regime Change, We Need a New Cosmological Vision