New Criterion articles from January 2005

New Criterion archives from January 2005

Notes & comments: January 2005.
January 1, 2005... The Barnes Foundation, RIP It is last-act time for the Barnes Foundation, the art school that the pharmaceutical magnate Albert C. Barnes founded in the 1920s in Merion, Pennsylvania, a plush suburb of Philadelphia. Last month, Judge...

Gallimaufry & more: "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.".
January 1, 2005... Of the many things I admire about the Victorians--their moral passion, their elevated patriotism, their extraordinary cultural and political and scientific achievements--perhaps what I admire most is their energy. We all know about Anthony...

Butler's unhappy youth.(Samuel Butler)
January 1, 2005... A Russian friend of mine, who escaped the Soviet Union for America and who now lives in England, once told me that in his early years in the West he would always introduce himself at parties by saying, "Hello, I'm Alex, I hate my parents, don't...

Jane Austen, anti-Jacobin.(Women novelists)
January 1, 2005... In a well-known essay first published in 1948 ("Manners, Morals, and The Novel"), Lionel Trilling wrote memorably of "the buzz of implication" which belongs to each time and each culture, and which it is very difficult for those of later times...

Morisot & Manet.(Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet, painters)
January 1, 2005... Berthe Morisot's letters to her sister Edma and Edouard Manet's many portraits of Berthe strongly suggest that they were lovers. Manet admired Morisot's work, relished her talk, and fell in love with her. Often alone together in his studio,...

Overpass.(New poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Overpass Beyond the clouds' crumpled page, a winter watermark of sun. The houses lean on the wind, another transient body of wind within weather, an unbound spill of smoke, soot to smudge these hills. A clutter ...

Landscape.(New poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Landscape Trepanned: in other words, my mind wanders no further than the map I drew from memory, marking the stone-circled embers memory makes smoke --wisps to occlude whatever arrow-line I'd draw next. Next is...

Animi cruciatus.(New poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Animi cruciatus (Affliction of spirit) Imagine the bullet cracking her skull, entering the frontal lobe, the blood under her face like a halo, the flood of her final breath, inhaled and exhaled, full of peppermint...

Conrad's Latin America.(Reconsiderations)(Joseph Conrad's Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard)
January 1, 2005... Last year marked the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Although not among his best-known works, it is in many ways his most remarkable. Indeed, it could be said to be the most...

Photography's painter.(Art)
January 1, 2005... These days, the boundaries between forms of visual art are permeable. Artists produce work that resists being relegated to strict categories, cheerfully combining paint, photo-based imagery, computer manipulations, three-dimensional...

Gallery chronicle.(Art)
January 1, 2005... Several years ago, at a panel of art academics, I witnessed an eye-opening event. Behind an array of dons were projected the images of taro Picasso paintings--one, an abstract arrangement of colored shapes, the other, a figure. After a surfeit...

Opera note.(Music)(Rodelinda (1725))(Author Abstract)
January 1, 2005... Handel's Rodelinda at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Handel's Rodelinda (1725) has always been one of his most famous operas, with much magnificent music. When it was performed in Gottingen in 1920, it marked the beginning of the Handel...

Honor enduring.(The media)
January 1, 2005... "The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a very big shift," said David Blunkett, the British Home Secretary, in September 2003, "where rights were predominant but duties were secondary. There has to be a balance restored to the two." The...

Tom Wolfe's school days.(Books)
January 1, 2005... Tom Wolfe is widely acknowledged to be one of the great journalists of his era, but his reputation as a novelist has never been as firm. He took a famous drubbing from his contemporaries John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving, "serious"...

Dizzy's dominion.(Disraeli: A Personal History)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Christopher Hibbert Disraeli: A Personal History. HarperCollins, 401 pages, 25 [pounds sterling] Britain during the nineteenth century was virtually free from the revolutionary turmoils that so weakened political and economic progress in...

Rara avis.(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Richard Rhodes John James Audubon: The Malting of an American. Knopf, 516 pages, $30 reviewed by Michael J. Lewis The threads of John James Audubon's achievement--scientific, commercial, and artistic--are coiled so tightly that they...

Starting from zero.(book)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Paul Goldberger Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of Ground Zero. Random House, 273 pages, $24.95 reviewed by Francis Morrone No sooner had the World Trade Center been destroyed than people--politicians, the...

Giuseppe Garibaldi: My Life.(Shorter notices)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Giuseppe Garibaldi: My Life. Hesperus Press, 173 pages, $15.95 Hesperus Classics has shed a welcome light over the book world. Inaugurated in 2002 and distributed by Trafalgar Square Books in the United States, this London-based publisher...

John J. Miller & Mark Molesky: Our Oldest Enemy: the History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France.(Shorter notices)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... John J. Miller & Mark Molesky Our Oldest Enemy: The History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France. Doubleday, 261 pages, $24.95 Recall that the "rush" to war with Iraq was attended in the U.S. by an efflorescence of Francophobic...

The last great fair.(Notebook)
January 1, 2005... In the Spring of 1939, standing on the roof of our apartment house at night and gazing due cast, you could see in the distance the glow of the New York World's Fair. Sometimes you saw the colors change, from blue to green to rose and sometimes...

The uses of lexica.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... To the Editors: I am grateful for Roger Kimball's attention to nay book, but I write to correct the misleading account he gives of nay testimony in the Colorado trial of Evans v. Romer. He is not the first to circulate this inaccurate...

Deceiving the deceivers.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... To the Editors: David Pryce-Jones makes several major errors in his brief references to my book, Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guyf Burgess. He claims that in my account the British intelligence services...