You Have the Body

Habeas Corpus. From England to Empire by Paul D. Halliday. (Harvard University Press, 2010, 502 pp., $39.95) The legal right to be judged by a neutral arbiter before as a condition of imprisonment is deeply ingrained in the Anglo-American legal system, so much so that...

Two Cold Warriors

The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War by Nicholas Thompson. Henry Holt and Company, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-8050-8142-8, pp. 403, $27.50The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War is not a...

The Farewell Address Revisited

As late as a century ago Washington’s Farewell Address would have ranked along with the Declaration and the Constitution as an intellectual source of periodic self-renewal for American patriots. It was still being memorized and declaimed in schools and referred to...

Recommended reading on economics

In Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute, Ryan Anderson has a two-part article on the flaws of modern economics (part one) (part two). We commend it to your attention. Anderson notes the lacunae in modern economic thought, which has little...

Poetry and the Common Language

If there is one principle which is nearly axiomatic among our contemporaries who regard themselves as poets and critics of poetry, it is that poetry should be written in the language of the everyday. This opinion can be traced back to Wordsworth’s famous assertion...