Eliot’s Politics in Context

by | Apr 7, 2013

Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics, by Leon Surette. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Cloth, xv + 363 pages. $59.95.Some years ago at a conference a speaker mentioned in passing that Eliot had “flirted with fascism.” This comment...

Glory and Indignity

by | Oct 21, 2012

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

by | Sep 30, 2012

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

by | Feb 26, 2012

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

by | Oct 16, 2011

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,...