Virgil Through the Centuries
The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid, by Philip Hardie. I.B. Tauris, 2014, 256 pp., $35.Virgil’s Aeneid, the Roman national epic that recounts the mythic origins of the Eternal City, is among the most influential and widely read books in...Spring Newsletter
The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2015) has just been posted. It features news on the recent Edmund Burke Society conference and other recent visitors and scholars at the Kirk Center. You can download it, and past issues, here.What We’re Reading (Summer 2015)
From Waterloo to Palomar, from children’s fiction to philosophy, our contributors and friends again provide their summer reading lists. Eve Tushnet I hope to spend this summer soaking up the sun with Los Bros. Hernandez’s epic comic book series “Love and Rockets.” The...Norman Mailer and the End of Journalism
Would Norman Mailer have fallen for the UVA rape hoax? The answer, of course, is no. Journalist Sabrina’s Erdely’s “expose” of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, an expose that was published in Rolling Stone magazine to great fanfare in December 2014, was...The Holiness of Hobbitry
Tolkien’s Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle-earth by Craig Bernthal. Angelico Press, 2014. Paperback, 316 pages, $17. In 1999, Joseph Pearce lamented that J. R. R. Tolkien “is not generally perceived to be one of the key protagonists of the Catholic...
A Conservative Manifesto for Europe
Zeitgeist & Headwinds: A Conservative Manifesto [Original German: Zeitgeist und Gegenwind—Ein konservatives Manifest] by Florian Stumfall. Hemau, Germany: Tangrintler Medienhaus, 2011. Hardcover, 243 pages, €25.Florian Stumfall is a seasoned Christian German...On Cocktail Time
In 1958, P. G. Wodehouse published Cocktail Time, one of his “Uncle Fred books.” Bertram Wilberforce Wooster does not appear in this book, nor does Jeeves, but Bertie’s friend “Pongo” Twistleton does, as well as a butler by the name of Albert Peasemarch. Pongo’s Uncle...Unequal Victors
A conversation with Michael Neiberg.In Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe the award-winning historian Michael Neiberg recounts in vivid detail the extraordinary drama behind the most historic and important diplomatic meeting between world...Why Secular Liberalism Isn’t Liberal
John Gray, René Girard, and the return of tribal religionI stuck around St. Petersburg When I saw it was a time for a change Killed the czar and his ministers Anastasia screamed in vain … Pleased to meet you Hope you guess my name, oh yeah Ah, what’s puzzling you Is...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!