Conversation in Collapse

The Conversation, Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. American Zoetrope / Paramount, 1974. 113 minutes.Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is one of the artsier entries in the long list of 1970s paranoia flicks. The film begins with a crane shot of a busy San...

The Real Charm of Oxford

On Essays and Letters“Yes, Oxford in September, in the quiet, the scarlet creeper, and the mist, is the Oxford of dreams and visions: ‘She needs not June for beauty’s heightenings’ (Matthew Arnold). And yet, you know the real charm of the place is not the quiet but...

The State of American Liberal Education These Days

What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. America, Tocqueville...

Ten Conservative Books Revisited

In 1986, Russell Kirk gave a lecture titled “Ten Conservative Books” in which he identified ten important books that distilled or expressed conservative principles, from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France to T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of...
Having It Both Ways

Having It Both Ways

A conversation with novelist and poet James Lasdun. James Lasdun published his first book of short stories, The Silver Age, in 1985. The debut won him the Dylan Thomas Award and was followed by Three Evenings, another book of stories. In 1998, Italian filmmaker...

Back to the Sources, Almost

Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir by David Grene. University of Chicago Press, 2006, cloth, 184 pages, $35. Reviewed by John Byron Kuhner Augustine, in praising God’s choice to place Adam and Eve in a garden that needed tending, waxed poetic. “When all is said and...

A Road Not Taken

A conversation with Michael Brendan DoughertyIn a pair of recent articles for the American Conservative, Michael Brendan Dougherty—who may also be the only conservative to grace the Apollo Theater stage—has been exploring a path not taken by the Republican Party, but...

A Conservative Scholar’s Wisdom

The Case for Conservatism by Francis Graham Wilson, with a new introduction by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers [1951, 1969, 1990, 2011], 74 pp., $20 paper. Forty years have passed since Francis Wilson first published the three lectures contained in this elegant...

Annette Kirk Remembers Valerie Eliot

Kirk Center President Annette Kirk has written a brief remembrance of Valerie Eliot, their meetings, and the literary friendship of their late husbands.

Mrs. Kirk on Valerie Eliot (1926–2012)

When a handsome, statuesque Valerie Eliot entered the restaurant at which we met in June 1999, the pianist broke into selections from the musical Cats, much to the delight of my two daughters who a decade earlier had attended that musical in London with Russell and...