Thinking Like Edmund Burke?

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence. By David Bromwich. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 512 pages, $40. This first installment of a two-volume intellectual biography of Burke is...

A Marvelous Tale

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $28. J. R. R. Tolkien’s newly published translation of Beowulf will be of interest to two overlapping groups: on the one hand,...

Progressives and the Booboisie

The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class by Fred Siegel. Encounter Books, 2014. Hardcover, 240 pages, $24.What do H. L. Mencken and Barack Obama have in common? Not much, it would seem. The sage of Baltimore was skeptical of all...

Books in Little

The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government by Philip K. Howard. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. 257 pages, $24. It is obvious that the current system of government is failing—higher expenses, increased waste, and little (if any)...