To Serve with Honor
Maurras, Le Chaos et l’Ordre by Stéphane Giocanti. Flammarion (Paris), 575 pp., $39.46 paper, 2006Stéphane Giocanti quotes Colonel Rémy, one of the heroes of the French Resistance and a close compagnon of General de Gaulle, saying that if he had joined the Allied and...
The Witness Revisited
Whittaker Chambers and American ConservatismIt is now 46 years since the death of Whittaker Chambers. His name is still iconic for many conservatives and a catalyst for boiling resentment among left-liberals. In those who know the full story of the Hiss case, and...
The Presence of a Teacher
A Path Remembered: The Lives of Gerhart and Lucie Niemeyer by Paul V. Niemeyer. ISI Books (Wilmington, Del.), 402 pp., $40.00 cloth, 2006When, as a graduate student at Notre Dame, I first met Gerhart Niemeyer early in 1970, like many others I knew immediately that he...
Sketches of Painterly Lives
The Art of the Art BiographyRecently I met up with an agent to discuss my next book. What about writing a biography of an artist?, he suggested. What about the research?, I responded. As an editor and art critic for a monthly magazine, I just couldn’t see clearing my...
I couldn't help but to think of some figures on X when I read this:
"Moreover, it is possible that Somer was, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet himself, both mad and acting mad—both a (semi-) natural fool as well as someone who constructed the exterior personality of a fool.
Jesse Russell…