Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man By Peter K. Andersson. Princeton University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 224 pages, $27.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a...
Muses of a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film, and Literature By Paul Krause. Stone Tower Press, 2024. Paperback, 227 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. Roman Polanski’s 1974 masterpiece Chinatown is not only a classic of film noir, but it is also one of the greatest...
Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa By Anthony Grafton. Belknap Press, 2023. Hardcover, 304 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. “Dame Frances Yates” is a name that usually does not cross the lips of the educated public. However, in the field of...
Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power By Leah Redmond Chang. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023. Hardcover, 512 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. In the Anglophone world, there is one (and only one) Renaissance queen: Elizabeth Tudor....
Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company, 1550-1650 By David Howarth. Yale University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 480 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. One of the most popular phrases among Marxists during the long reign of Barack H. Obama was...
“The Last God’s Dream,” while certainly among the more daring of Kirk’s “experiments in the moral imagination”(as he described his literary efforts), is also one of the more successful at blending the author’s varied interests in politics, history, literature, and metaphysics.