Conservatism and Decline

The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk. Fifth revised edition. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1973. In 1902, from somewhere on Regent Street, my mother watched Edward VII’s coronation parade. As she saw this gold and scarlet pageant drawn from the...

Happier Cities, Happier Lives?

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 290 pages, $27.This is a fascinating and informative but at the same time maddening book. It contains a wealth of evidence making the case that...

On Having Faces

Recently, I received a letter, post-marked Lima, from a young Peruvian student who had attended Georgetown. She tells me that she has just finished reading C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, a book that I recommend to anyone who will listen. She writes: One of my...

Happiness or Joy?

Pedro Blas González If man were happy, he would be the more so, the less he was diverted, like the Saints and God. —Yes; but is it not to be happy to have a faculty of being amused by diversion? —No; for that comes from elsewhere and from without, and thus is...

Gottfried Responds

Paul Gottfried responds to Daniel McCarthy’s review of his book on Leo Strauss.Dan McCarthy is to be commended for his fair-minded review of my study of Leo Strauss and Strauss’s influence on the American conservative movement. I hope that Dan’s efforts will have the...
Unamuno: No Evangelist, No Secularist

Unamuno: No Evangelist, No Secularist

The Agony of Christianity by Miguel de Unamuno. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan; annotated by Anthony Kerrigan and Martin Nozick. Vol. 5 in the Bollingen works of Unamuno. Princeton University Press, 1974. $11.00.If, a hundred or a thousand years from now, there are...

A Fair-Minded Polemic

LeoStrauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal by Paul Edward Gottfried. Cambridge, 2013. Paperback, 194 pages, $27. Every year brings a new crop of books about Leo Strauss. The New York Times last year reviewed two, Laurence Lampert’s The...

Liberal Impartiality

The Burke-Paine Controversy: Texts and Criticism, edited by Ray B. Browne. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963. 230 pp. The famous controversy between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine was really not a controversy at all. Burke published his Reflections on the...

Call for Proposals

Our friend and Bookman contributor Lee Trepanier writes to us about a new series he is launching for Lexington Books: Lexington Books is pleased to announce the launch of the following new book series: Politics, Literature, and Film. We are actively seeking proposals...
It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s J. Alfred Prufrock!

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s J. Alfred Prufrock!

A conversation with Julian PetersJulian Peters is in the process of creating a comic book adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He graciously agreed to an interview with poetry critic and comic book aficionado, Micah Mattix, to discuss the...