Glory and Indignity

John Randolph of Roanoke by David Johnson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012 Cloth, 352 pages, $45. “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality.” Thus spoke John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833), one of the most curious, animated figures ever...

A Global Life in Ideas

Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick by Peter Collier. New York: Encounter Books, 2012. 241 pp. $26.Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was the intellectual giant of the first four years of the Reagan administration. After Reagan swept to a forty-nine-state...

Outposts of Culture

The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain by Jason Harding. Oxford University Press (New York, New York) 250 pp., $55.00 cloth, 2002.In the final issueof the Criterion, which appeared in January 1939, T. S. Eliot wrote that...

Why the Union Soldiers Fought

The Union War by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard University Press, 2011), 256 pages, $28. Nearly every Southerner was raised studying the Civil War, or, as some here call it, the War Between the States. By the time I entered the public school system in Marietta, Georgia,...