The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.
Having It Both Ways
Novelist and poet James Lasdun speaks with the Bookman about why he feels violence is an important theme to be explored in poetry, how Chekhov modernized him as a writer, and why an industrial wasteland in New Jersey inspired the milieu for one of his novels.
Back to the Sources, Almost
Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir by David Grene. University of Chicago Press, 2006, cloth, 184 pages, $35. Reviewed by John Byron Kuhner Augustine, in praising God’s choice to place Adam and Eve in a garden that needed tending, waxed poetic. “When all is said and...
A Road Not Taken
A conversation with Michael Brendan DoughertyIn a pair of recent articles for the American Conservative, Michael Brendan Dougherty—who may also be the only conservative to grace the Apollo Theater stage—has been exploring a path not taken by the Republican Party, but...
A Conservative Scholar’s Wisdom
The Case for Conservatism by Francis Graham Wilson, with a new introduction by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers [1951, 1969, 1990, 2011], 74 pp., $20 paper. Forty years have passed since Francis Wilson first published the three lectures contained in this elegant...
Annette Kirk Remembers Valerie Eliot
Kirk Center President Annette Kirk has written a brief remembrance of Valerie Eliot, their meetings, and the literary friendship of their late husbands.
Mrs. Kirk on Valerie Eliot (1926–2012)
When a handsome, statuesque Valerie Eliot entered the restaurant at which we met in June 1999, the pianist broke into selections from the musical Cats, much to the delight of my two daughters who a decade earlier had attended that musical in London with Russell and...
A Candle in the Darkness
Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. Thomson/West (St. Paul), 2012608 pp., $49.95, cloth.These are dark days for American law. In June, Chief Justice John Roberts, in what was a stark betrayal of his oath to uphold the...
The Character of Our Constitution
Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution by Russell Kirk. Spence Publishing Company, 1997, 208 pp., $28 cloth.The present book includes all of Kirk’s earlier work, The Conservative Constitution (too long unavailable), and adds to it a number of...
Fall Newsletter
We are pleased to release the Fall 2012 Permanent Things, the latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter, featuring updates on recent events and seminars at the Center.
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
