‘Spoken with Sufficient Seriousness’
On April 12, 1656, Pascal began his XI Provincial Letter “To the Reverend Fathers, the Jesuits,” in this manner: “Reverend Fathers, I have seen the letters which you are circulating in opposition to those which I wrote to one of my friends on your morality; and I...Churchill Defends the Gallipoli Campaign
Winston Churchill reportedly once remarked that history would treat him kindly because he intended to write it. Churchill’s efforts to do so failed with respect to the Gallipoli Campaign—the allied attempt during the First World War to force the Dardanelles Strait,...Ethnicity Matters
Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Oxford University Press, 1993. Hardcover, 221 pages, $110. In 1947, Solomon Bloom, a student of Marxism and nationalism, published an article in Commentary entitled “The Peoples of my Home...Norman Lear, Conservative?
Even This I Get to Experience by Norman Lear. Penguin Press, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $33.British comic novelist and television writer Douglas Adams was once asked to explain the difference between a comic writer and a wit. “A wit will think of a funny response at...The Whig Theory of Christianity
Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $35. In its basic assumptions, liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity. It emerged as the moral institutions...Virgil Through the Centuries
The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid, by Philip Hardie. I.B. Tauris, 2014, 256 pp., $35.Virgil’s Aeneid, the Roman national epic that recounts the mythic origins of the Eternal City, is among the most influential and widely read books in...Spring Newsletter
The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2015) has just been posted. It features news on the recent Edmund Burke Society conference and other recent visitors and scholars at the Kirk Center. You can download it, and past issues, here.What We’re Reading (Summer 2015)
From Waterloo to Palomar, from children’s fiction to philosophy, our contributors and friends again provide their summer reading lists. Eve Tushnet I hope to spend this summer soaking up the sun with Los Bros. Hernandez’s epic comic book series “Love and Rockets.” The...Norman Mailer and the End of Journalism
Would Norman Mailer have fallen for the UVA rape hoax? The answer, of course, is no. Journalist Sabrina’s Erdely’s “expose” of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, an expose that was published in Rolling Stone magazine to great fanfare in December 2014, was...
I couldn't help but to think of some figures on X when I read this:
"Moreover, it is possible that Somer was, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet himself, both mad and acting mad—both a (semi-) natural fool as well as someone who constructed the exterior personality of a fool.
Jesse Russell…