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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Paul du Quenoy |Robert Erickson |Andrew Shea |Suzanna Murawski
The San Franciso Symphony’s season is ending better than it started, though the conclusion is bittersweet with the all-too-soon departure of its music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the award-winning Finnish conductor and composer who has led the orchestra since 2020.
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Suzanna Murawski |Robert Erickson |Andrew Shea |Douglas Murray
Recent stories of note:“Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein”Matt Dinan, The Hedgehog ReviewWhen Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein was published twenty-five years ago, it was widely lambasted as, in the words of one critic, a “shockingly bad” memoir of “cruel violations” for revealing unsavory private details about the scholar Allan Bloom, upon whom the novel’s character Abe Ravelstein was based. But if you look a little closer, the correspondence is not so one-to-one.
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Mark Judge |Robert Erickson |Andrew Shea |Douglas Murray
In 2020 a brilliant novel was published called The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures, by Jennifer Hofmann. Kirkus called it “a remarkable first novel that reads like the work of a seasoned pro.”Despite great reviews, Standardization did not hit the bestseller lists. At the time of publication, the country was focused on the George Floyd riots and the fallout from COVID. Still, for those of us who read the book, it left a lasting impression.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | Andrew Shea |Douglas Murray |Suzanna Murawski |Roger Kimball
Nonfiction:Gustav Mahler, by Stephen Downes (Reaktion Books):Goethe, Wagner, Nietzsche: these are fairly well-known influences on the music and thought of Gustav Mahler. Fewer know, I’d wager, that Mahler was an avid reader of Laurence Sterne’s digressive free-for-all Tristram Shandy, or of E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose Tomcat Murr is a similarly whimsical novel purporting to be the memoirs of a cat accidentally shuffled with a Mahleresque composer’s biography.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | Brian Anderson |Andrew Shea |Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball
Show AllShow ArticlesShow DispatchShow TNC+ MultimediaAll Authors, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Abel, LionelAbowitz, RichardAdams, HarryAdams, J.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
Volatility today leads us to look at the foundations of the international world that is now being transformed. The key decade was the 1940s, the period of the establishment of American superpower status, the destruction of the German, Italian, and Japanese empires, the expansion of the Soviet empire, and the Communist conquest of China.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
Employed in my youth at John Wanamaker’s department store, an institution in Philadelphia until it disappeared, I was sometimes cheered by encountering employees who told me of their fascinations with history. One such colleague I remember was a burly black shelf-stocker. “My girl,” he told me, “is Queen Victoria. She got her family on thrones all over Europe.”So she did, to the point that she was considered the “grandmother of Europe,” through marriages rather than military conquests.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
“Modern American conservatism has two founding fathers: Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr.” The description is Charles Krauthammer’s. There are other paeans.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
In 1874, the eighteen-year-old John Singer Sargent and his American expatriate parents moved to Paris, from Florence, where he was born in 1856, partly in quest of better art teaching for the preternaturally talented teenager. Sargent spent the next decade based in the French capital, until he moved to London, where he lived until his death in 1925.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 24, 2025, honoring Heather Mac Donald with the twelfth Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society. I would like to thank The New Criterion for this generous honor—hugely undeserved, I would say, but who am I to question Editor and Publisher Roger Kimball? Throughout 2024, you see, Roger spoke confidently about the outcome of the November election.
