New Criterion articles from November 2005

New Criterion archives from November 2005

Earth to Stockholm ...(Harold Pinter, Nobel Literary Prize)
November 1, 2005... Quoth Harold Pinter: "I have no idea why they gave me the award." The award, of course, was the Nobel Prize for... well, supposedly for literature. In the case of Harold Pinter, however, literature had nothing do with the prize. How could it?...

Freedom and philanthropy.(John M. Olin Foundation)
November 1, 2005... As regular readers of The New Criterion know, the magazine has from its founding been a beneficiary of the John M. Olin Foundation. As we noted in this space last year, the Olin Foundation, in accordance with the wishes of Mr. Olin, will be...

A birthday tribute.(Notes & Comments: November 2005)(William F. Buckley's National Review)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Essential though the work of the Olin Foundation was, there is another conservative institution celebrating a milestone this month: we mean National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955, fifty years ago this month. Later in this...

Holmes & his commentators.(Sherlock Holmes' characterization and works of journalists)
November 1, 2005... According to Hazlitt, if we wish to know the force of human genius, we have only to read Shakespeare, but if we wish to know the futility of human learning, we have only to read his commentators. Something similar might almost be...

Science versus scientism.
November 1, 2005... On graduation from college I entered Yale Divinity School, not because I had decided to become a minister, but because of increasing doubts about the religious faith in which I had been reared. I supposed God had a purpose for my life, but I...

Rediscovering Sassoon.(Siegfried Sassoon: A Life)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Though Siegfried Sassoon lived a very long life, dying of natural causes at the age of eighty in 1967, he remains frozen, for posterity, somewhere in his late twenties, as an infantry officer in the trenches of the Western Front. Tall, elegant,...

Being blunt about Blunt.(Anthony Blunt, British art historian, Soviet spy)
November 1, 2005... The Burlington Magazine, published in London, once bore a full title labeling it "for Connoisseurs." It advertises itself as "the world's leading monthly publication devoted to the fine and decorative arts." In January zoos it printed an...

New poems.(Poem)
November 1, 2005... Calmly, the papers calculate the chance That in ten years the planet and a shard Of rock will consummate the long romance We've led with ruin. This will be ignored: Not for the long but lotto-beating odds, But from the...

Suddenly.(New poems)(Poem)
November 1, 2005... Suddenly The truck came at me, I swerved but I got a dent. The car insurance woman informs me that my policy has been cancelled. I say, "You can't do that." She gives me a little smile and...

Buckley at the beginning.(Reflections)
November 1, 2005... National Review is now celebrating its fiftieth year of publication. It has been central to and helped shape the American conservative movement. It has also been a home to an astonishing array of talent, not all of it conservative--from...

Antiquities true & false.(The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris)
November 1, 2005... Imagine a prestigious, hard-to-get-into art school full of fiercely competitive students who regard making art as a career choice as much as a creative necessity. Their course of study is designed to foster correct thinking, according to the...

Gallery chronicle.(art exhibitions in New York)
November 1, 2005... Gone are the days of "Must-See A.R.T." Today the art scene is Premium Cable On-Demand. In New York alone, there is a gallery for every man, woman, and child in the art world. Nobody can keep up with it; no one can see everything, nor, frankly,...

Manicheanism a la mode.(The Media)
November 1, 2005... Lately, I have been between spam filters and found that deleting junk e-mail one item at a time can sometimes be instructive. "You can get the watches you've dreamed about" reads the subject line of one of them, prompting the thought: Who the...

Too much of nothing.(The March)(Shalimar the Clown)(Lunar Park)(The Diviners)(Indecision)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... One of the ways in which war becomes palatable to those not in the fight is by cliche. Even Sherman's impassioned plea that all glory in war is moonshine, that war is hell, has been rubbed smooth by the retelling. It has lost its humanity and...

A war without heroes.(A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Victor Davis Hanson may just be our best military historian of the ancient world. He has traced the hard hand of war on Greek grain fields and olive groves, analyzed the agony of the ancient Greek infantryman, explicated specific battles, and...

Bloody old England.(After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... A. N. Wilson After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 624 pages, $35 A. N. Wilson is one of Britain's most impressive, important, and versatile writers, the author of nineteen novels (including the...

Spacious perspectives.(Symbolic Essence and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... William H. Jordy Symbolic Essence and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture. Yale, 315 pages, $35 Among critics of architecture, the late William H. Jordy never achieved the national celebrity of Lewis Mumford or Ada...

Hypothesis finxit.(Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Dan Rockmore Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis. Pantheon Books, 296 pages, $25 The author of a pop-math book must decide, before he sets finger on keyboard, how much he is going to demand of his readers in the way of willingness to engage...

Der Dichter ist tod.(The Oxford History of Western Music)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Richard Taruskin The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press, six volumes, 3825 pages, $600 Comprehensive histories of an art form are a daunting task, and a history of a major art form like so-called "classical" music in...

Mary Kinzie's Bogan.(Louise Bogan A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Louise Bogan A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, edited by Mary Kinzie. Swallow Press, 394 pages, $19.95 (paper) Most readers will recognize the name of the lyric poet Louise Bogan (if at all) as a brief stop on the way from...

Maurice Cowling, 1926-2005.(Notebook)(Fellow of Peterhouse in Cambridge)(Obituary)
November 1, 2005... Maurice Cowling, who died in August, just short of eighty, was a politics and history Fellow of Peterhouse in Cambridge. Some university teachers are significant because they use their university as a base from which to address the world....