Johnson’s Churchill: A Mythic Figure for Our Age

The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. by Boris Johnson. New York: Riverhead Books, 2014. Hardcover, 400 pages, $28.Reviewed by John P. Rossi Is there a need for yet another book on Winston Churchill? My university library with a modest number of volumes has...

A New Look at George Orwell

George Orwell: English Rebel by Robert Colls. Oxford University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 330 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by John P. Rossi This is a curious book. It is not a traditional biography. Nor is it an intellectual biography. Instead it is an attempt, through a...

Reconsidering Orwell’s Essays

A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. Doubleday, 1952. [Harcourt, 1970] Reviewed by John P. Rossi George Orwell was the greatest essayist of the twentieth century. Sixty years ago, at the height of his fame as the author of Animal Farm, Orwell published a...

John Lukacs as Teacher

A Lukacs Symposium John P. Rossi For years the Reader’s Digest had a feature entitled “The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met.” For me that was John Lukacs and the meeting took place in 1955 during my sophomore year at La Salle College. As a freshman I had heard...

A Study of Two Masters of English Prose

The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff. Random House (New York) 264 pp., 2008 Reviewed by John P. Rossi Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were two of the twentieth century’s greatest masters of English prose: Waugh in his comic...