Why We Need Beauty
A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art By Michael B. Gill. Princeton University Press, 2022. Hardcover, 248 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Lee Trepanier. Now neglected in the Western canon, Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,...
What Makes a Classic?
Wit’s Treasury: Renaissance England and the Classics By Stephen Orgel. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Hardcover, 216 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by John Tuttle. What is a classic? It’s a provocative question for the literary-bent mind. Just what...
Where Is Home?
A Song to Keep: A Kinship of Poems and Drawings By Olivia Findlay and Domenica de Ferranti. Scotland Street Press, 2021. Hardcover, 112 pages, $35. Reviewed by Ashlee Cowles. One of the most prominent and compelling themes in literature, including poetry, is the...
Russell Kirk vs. Fusionism: A Conflict in Name Only?
By Jason Jewell. This essay is based on remarks delivered at NatCon3 in Miami in September 2022. Fusionism, the strategy to form an alliance between political conservatives and libertarians during the Cold War, was hotly debated among primary figures in the movement...
Restoring the True and the Beautiful
The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus By Andrew Klavan. Zondervan Books, 2022. Hardcover, 272 pages, $26.99. Reviewed by Emeline McClellan. English prose has entered a...
The book’s defense of McCarthyism also fares even better over half a century after its publication, as the opening of the Soviet archives gave Americans far more information than the authors had in 1954 and made abundantly clear not only the reality of Soviet infiltration of the…
Today, we know so much more about the communist infiltration of our government and society in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in his early career. Yet, it turns out that Buckley and his allies were closer to the truth about domestic communism than their…