Creating in Community

Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings by Diana P. Glyer. Kent State University Press, 2015. Paperback, 224 pages, $19.There is no shortage of books on the authors who made up the best known writing group of the...

An Anti-Utopian Life

Isaiah Berlin: A Life, by Michael Ignatieff. New York: Owl Books, 1999. Paper, 356pp., $16. Isaiah Berlin, who died in 1997, was that rare man of letters who was also a man of the world. If Churchill was the statesman who earned laurels as an historian, Berlin was the...

Kissinger as Political Philosopher

Kissinger 1923–1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson. New York: Penguin Press, 2015. Hardcover, 986 pp., $39.95. Henry Kissinger has been called many things in his long, eventful public career, but “idealist” is not one of them. Until now. The first volume of the...

Pierre Manent’s Common Political Science

Seeing Things Politically: Interviews with Benedicte Delorme-Montini by Pierre Manent. St. Augustine’s Press, 2015. Hardcover, 240 pages, $30.   “Thomists have moralized and depoliticized Aristotle,” French Catholic philosopher Pierre Manent charges in his book,...

Risking Literature in the Obama Era

Bearings and Distances by Glenn Arbery. Wiseblood Books, 2015. Paperback, 335 pages, $13.To those who desire to think the same way others think, who long to crush dissent and to be on the right side of history, real literature is an oddity, an affront, the relic of an...

Fighting Cousins

Yanks and Limeys: Alliance Warfare in the Second World War. by Niall Barr. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015. Hardcover, 548 pages, $30. Reviewed by John P. Rossi It is generally agreed that World War II was a victory of Russian numbers and American industrial output. True...