The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.
On Valerie Eliot
Dr. Lockerd reflects on the life of Valerie Eliot.Valerie Eliot’s life was a strange sort of Cinderella story. She became an admirer of T. S. Eliot’s poetry at a young age and eagerly applied later for the job of secretary to Mr. Eliot at Faber and Faber. Ten years...
Pure Narrative Pleasure
Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version by Philip Pullman. Viking Adult, 2012, Cloth, 400 pages, $28.My earliest introduction to story came from two sources, the orange Childcraft books devoted to fairytales and Arthur Maxwell’s blue Bible Story...
Living Conservatism
Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: the Legacy of Burke and Tocqueville, by Bruce Frohnen. University Press of Kansas, 1993. Cloth, 264 pages, $25.Conservatism lives. It continues to exercise its power over bright young minds. It also shows us a way of life, how...
Jacques Barzun, 1907–2012
“Le style est l’homme,” wrote the Comte de Buffon. Applied to Jacques Barzun, Buffon’s statement reveals a man at once elegant but unpretentious, a man both sophisticated and humane. Born on November 30, 1907 in Créteil, France, Jacques Barzun was early initiated into...
The Gifts of the Present
Berkeley-Paris Express: A Lively Memoir of Studying Classical Music and Painting by Webster Young. Santa Fe, N.M.: Editions D’Auteurs, 2012, 347 pages, $14.50; Kindle Edition, $9.95. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien famously wrote that God made men and women...
The Unknown Hegel
The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right by Paul Edward Gottfried. Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986, Revised edition 2010. Paper, $24. Few prominent postwar conservative thinkers have credited Hegelian concepts...
Kirk’s Ghostly Tales
Jeffrey D. Pearce recently guest edited two “lib guides”—thematic lists of reading resources—for the library of Everett Community College in Everett, Washington. In “Ghostly Sightings...And Other Scary Stories...”, Pearce links to Russell Kirk’s short story anthology...
Glory and Indignity
John Randolph of Roanoke by David Johnson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012 Cloth, 352 pages, $45. “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality.” Thus spoke John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833), one of the most curious, animated figures ever...
Sir Henry Sumner Maine on Democracy
Popular Government, by Henry Sumner Maine. Introduction by George W. Carey. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics [1885, 1976] [free online PDF edition at Liberty Fund]. It has been a good many years since the democratic political system, and all the principles upon which it...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition. Click on the icon in the upper right corner of the video to see more episodes in this series or check out our YouTube page.
