The Life Behind the Dance
Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling. Hamish Hamilton, 2017 (Knopf 2018). Hardcover, 509 pages, $29.70. Reviewed by James Baresel Over four decades ago the novelist Anthony Powell asked his friend Hilary Spurling if she was willing to be his...
A Woman Who Reads
Book Girl: A Journey through the Treasures and Transforming Power of a Reading Life By Sarah Clarkson. Tyndale Momentum, 2018. Paperback, 288 pages, $16. Reviewed by Ashlee Cowles What does it mean to be a woman who reads? This is the primary question Sarah Clarkson...
On Dragon Hunting
James V. Schall, S. J. Heywood Broun’s very short story, The Fifty-First Dragon, was published in 1921 by Harcourt Brace. It concerns a medieval school for the formation of knights. Matriculating in this school is an apparently inept candidate by the ironic name of...
He Knew the Reason We Fight
Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard by Cynthia L. Haven. Michigan State University Press, 2018. Paperback, 346 pages, $30. Reviewed by Patrick Kurp In their 1941 short feature In the Sweet Pie and Pie, Larry, Curly, and Moe are ex-cons hoping to marry three...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."