Encounter with a Real Borges
Borges and Me: An Encounter By Jay Parini. Doubleday, 2020. Hardcover, 320 pages, $27.95 Reviewed by Jerrod A. Laber We’ve all answered the question at some point about those famous individuals, dead or alive, that we would most like to have dinner with if given the...
The Ancient-Modern Quarrel over Tragedy
Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us By Simon Critchley. Vintage Books, 2020. Paperback, 322 pages. $17. Reviewed by Grant Havers The day after the passing of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965, Leo Strauss delivered a philosophical eulogy to his students, contrasting “the...
Salvation Through Compassion?
Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption by Roger Scruton. Allen Lane, 2020. Hardcover, 208 pages, £20.00 Reviewed by Paul Krause “We have been called not to explore the world, but to rescue it. In doing so we emerge from our trials and conflicts in full possession...
What Literature Makes Happen
E. J. Hutchinson What is literature for? Any number of things, one supposes—pleasure, say, or escape. But does it do anything else? In a frequently used and even more frequently misunderstood phrase, Auden says that “poetry makes nothing happen.”[1] But what if...
"The first question, and perhaps the most pressing one when reviewing a book by @McCormickProf, is this: Even in the comparatively small world of intellectual conservatism, is there anything George isn’t doing?" - R. McKay Stangler in @ubookman
"Nonetheless, admittedly indirect evidence has been put forth, evidence which at least suggests that Hoover might have been inadvertently onto something when he successfully proposed replacing the notion of a relatively quick “panic” with something more drawn out, maybe even