New Criterion articles from September 2005

New Criterion archives from September 2005

Notes & comments: September 2005.(British history, culture)(Editorial)
September 1, 2005... "Oh, to be in England..." We know what Robert Browning meant. We have long wished that The New Criterion were more readily available in England. Nor are we alone. Writing recently in The Claremont Review, the historian Paul Johnson...

Potemkin vistas.
September 1, 2005... Where'll always be an England, the casual visitor may comfortingly remind himself. Outward signs seem to affirm it. Derby day, Wensleydale cheese, cricket and football, policemen in quaint helmets, Georgian brick terraces, hedgerows, country...

British intellectual life today.
September 1, 2005... French intellectuals are often vain; German intellectuals are notoriously obscure; British intellectuals are merely embarrassed. But are they embarrassed to be British, or embarrassed to call themselves intellectuals? Unlike other Europeans or,...

The real British disease.(London bombings)
September 1, 2005... There is nothing in the law of unintended consequences that dictates such consequences must be unpleasant ones (though that's the way to bet, as Damon Runyon remarked of Ecclesiastes 9:11). An unintended and beneficial consequence of the London...

The people vs. the E.U.: a status report.
September 1, 2005... The once seemingly unstoppable project of European integration, started after World War II by Jean Monnet and long backed by the State Department, appeared momentarily to have hit the buffers after decisive French and Dutch referendum defeats...

The end of virtuous Albion.(British national character)
September 1, 2005... My wife, who is French, has lived in England for twenty-five years. When she arrived, she was both surprised and favorably struck by, among other things, the comparative uninterest, even of the rich, in material comfort and pleasures, and by...

Farewell, Church of England?
September 1, 2005... As we prepare for our Harvest Festival Services, we see that what's left of the English Church is indistinguishable from a lunatic asylum. Everywhere you peer inside this once refined and educated, lovely and lovable national institution, there...

Two concepts of the moral life.
September 1, 2005... One way of tracking the movement of a civilization is to follow the evolution of thought and sentiment in the moral life. The moral life is not, of course, any particular moral system, but the daily flow of thoughts and desires we experience as...

Trafalgar then & now.
September 1, 2005... The many celebrations of the bicentenary of Admiral Lord Nelson's death at the battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805 tell us much about how Britons view themselves in the early twenty-first century. No one has waited until the autumn itself...

Some Americans in London.
September 1, 2005... There is an essay by George Orwell entitled "Decline of English Murder." Written in 1946, it celebrates--if that is the word--the golden age of British domestic homicide, which Orwell sees as running from roughly 1850 to 1925. He picks out the...

A mystery novel.(New poems)(Poem)
September 1, 2005... A mystery novel Alone and diffident You enter what is there: The world that does not care For your predicament, For mysteries of who You must become, or what Your place is in the plot To which you...

Shopping.(New poems)(Poem)
September 1, 2005... Shopping Was there a special Mess you had in mind, sir? If you could be a little more specific... As you can see we've every size and kind, sir, From In Your Face to Mildly Soporific. Adultery is very popular-- ...

Before sleep.(New poems)(Poem)
September 1, 2005... Before sleep Let me not lie here, mulling the day's anger, Rehearsing, if there have been such, its tears; Let no bitterness beckon, envy linger; Save me from Circe's, Medusa's, cruel stares. Let me slip to Sleep's...

Cezanne & Pissarro: a crucial friendship.(Paul Cezanne, Camille Pissarro)(Biography)
September 1, 2005... You can blame Paul Cezanne for most of the great upheaval that we call modernism in Western painting. A century ago, the great 1907 memorial exhibition organized to honor him after his death the previous year was a life-changing experience for...

"Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity".(Exhibition notes)(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2005... "Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity" Tate Modern, London. May 26-September 18, 2005 "Frida Kahlo" Tate Modern, London. June 9-October 9, 2005 Anyone interested in the sociology of taste could hardly do better than visit London...

"Robert Smithson".(art exhibition)
September 1, 2005... "Robert Smithson" Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. June 23-October 16, 2005 We'll always have Paris. To certain American artists emerging in the 1950s, that was the problem. The School of Paris was flowering on their New York...

The Plame game.(scandal trading)
September 1, 2005... Almost every morning as I am shaving, I hear a radio commercial of the sort that produces in me what I call the Dan Rather effect--that is, the urge to talk back to electronic boxes. The message is on behalf of a jewelers' establishment called...

Dictionary Johnson.(Johnson on the English Language)(Book Review)
September 1, 2005... "Languages are the pedigree of nations." Samuel Johnson's thought is noble. The more authoritatively so, in that the profound pronouncement about language is issued by the greatest of dictionary-makers. Not--it has at once to be added--the...

The foot-fall of J. L-M.(Ceaseless Turmoil: Diaries 1988-1992)(Book Review)
September 1, 2005... James Lees-Milne Ceaseless Turmoil: Diaries 1988-1992, edited by Michael Bloch. John Murray, 339 pages, 25 [pounds sterling] In a low-keyed and immensely subtle way, James Lees-Milne was one of the most effective Englishmen of his time. In...

Less than zero.(Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics)(Book Review)
September 1, 2005... David Berlinski Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics. Modern Library, 224 pages, $21.95 The relevant library shelves in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences hold no fewer than eighteen different general histories of...

Attn: bin Laden.(Incendiary)(Book Review)
September 1, 2005... Chris Cleave Incendiary. Knopf, 256 pages, $22.95 On July 7, the day the tube bombings killed fifty-six people, British booksellers released Chris Cleave's Incendiary, a novel about a catastrophic suicide attack on Arsenal's new stadium in...

An air raid siren for the Left.(Notebook)(growth of pocket-sized monthly magazine Lilliput)
September 1, 2005... In London in 1937, Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian photojournalist who had served time in a Nazi prison, started a pocket-sized monthly magazine which combined English humor with European style. It was called Lilliput. Throughout the Second World...

Crazy in Cambodia.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2005... To the Editors: The article by Keith Windschuttle in the June issue, "The journalism of warfare," repeats my somewhat emotional claim, made in 1976, that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia in 1969-71 and 1973 drove at least some Cambodians out...