Succession and the Anarchy

Succession and the Anarchy

Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior by Catherine Hanley. Yale University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 277 pages, $30. Reviewed by Timothy D. Lusch By none but me can the tale be told, The butcher of Rouen, poor Berold. (Lands are swayed by a King on a throne.) ’Twas a royal...
Churchill’s Summer of Destiny

Churchill’s Summer of Destiny

John P. Rossi Winston Churchill was the greatest orator of the twentieth century. His most famous speeches rank with those of giants like Lincoln and Martin Luther King. A master of rhetoric with a gift for the memorable phrase, six of his speeches were transformative...

Beyond Cancel Culture

O’Connor, Updike, and the Literature of Self-Recrimination Michial Farmer The recent intra-literati arguments about Flannery O’Connor’s racism are, if nothing else, hard proof that ideas have consequences. Not long after the police killing of George Floyd ignited...
Burke’s Mannered Economics

Burke’s Mannered Economics

Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy by Gregory M. Collins. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 578 pages, $50. Reviewed by John G. Grove Only someone like Edmund Burke could find in the “motions of England’s internal grain trade” anything...
How the Vikings Saw Themselves

How the Vikings Saw Themselves

Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price. Basic Books, 2020. Hardcover, 624 pages, $35. Reviewed by Clayton Trutor When I stroll through the stacks of a college library, I often find my way over to the DL60s—History of Northern Europe: Earliest...
Skewering the Revolutionary Consciousness

Skewering the Revolutionary Consciousness

Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. Grove Press, 1968. Paperback, 123 page, $16. By Katya Sedgwick In June, when Black Lives Matter riots erupted in American cities, conservatives began rereading Tom Wolfe for insides on race relations. I,...