By Robert James Stove What makes organists tick? Denis Arnold (1926–1986), British biographer of Bach and Monteverdi, thought that he knew. In 1983 he remarked: “Organists have to be neat men: their mistakes do not, like a doctor’s, quietly die, but are all too...
A New English Music: Composers and Folk Traditions in England’s Musical Renaissance from the Late 19th to the Mid-20th Century by Tim Rayborn. McFarland & Co., 2016. Paperback, 312 pages, $40. Reviewed by R. J. Stove When I come to England, I don’t claim...
Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image by Matthew Cecil. University of Kansas Press, 2014. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35.Reviewed by R. J. StoveThe largely ignored death in South Carolina, in March 2013, of...
Dwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered by Tadeusz Lewandowski. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2013. Hardcover, 149 pages, $41. So intensely European was the critic Dwight Macdonald’s spirit, so routinely did he use European...
Paul Fussell, R.I.P. Paul Fussell died on May 23, 2012 at Medford, Oregon, aged 88. His smack-in-the-jaw prose makes it appear incredible that he should have succumbed to natural causes. A far more appropriate quietus for so aggressive a wordsmith would have been a...