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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | Victor Davis Hanson |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Anthony Daniels |David Pryce-Jones
The Vienna Philharmonic has completed its annual residency at Carnegie Hall—three concerts. The last was yesterday afternoon. On the podium, for all three concerts, was Riccardo Muti, the Italian maestro. He has conducted the Vienna Phil for, I believe, fifty-five straight seasons. Is that a record? We’ll have to consult the musical statisticians. From New York, the Philharmonic will travel, or has traveled, to California, for concerts under the baton of a different maestro, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
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2 months ago | 
newcriterion.com | Victor Davis Hanson |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Anthony Daniels |David Pryce-Jones
Anthony Eden was the ultimate glamour boy of mid-twentieth-century British politics. His father was a baronet with a substantial estate in County Durham in the northeast of England; his mother was a society beauty from the Grey family, who were magnates in neighboring Northumberland. Eden’s cabinet colleague and occasional rival R. A.
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2 months ago | 
newcriterion.com | Victor Davis Hanson |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Anthony Daniels |David Pryce-Jones
On the edge of Potsdam’s Old Market Square early on a sleepy Sunday morning, a sizable line was already forming outside the Museum Barberini waiting for its doors to open.
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2 months ago | 
newcriterion.com | Victor Davis Hanson |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Anthony Daniels |David Pryce-Jones
Samuel Johnson famously enjoined his friend James Boswell to “clear your mind of cant” lest meaningless phrases lead to foolish thinking. The critic and lexicographer had defined “cant” as both “a whining pretension to goodness” and “barbarous jargon,” with Jonathan Swift enlisted to describe it as “the most ruinous corruption in any language.” Few spaces today are more ridden with cant than academic scholarship.
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2 months ago | 
newcriterion.com | Victor Davis Hanson |Anthony Daniels |Eric Ormsby |James Panero
Yesterday afternoon, in Alice Tully Hall, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center offered a concert of Beethoven and Bruckner. Bruckner, in a chamber concert? Yes. More on that in due course. The first half of the concert comprised two Beethoven sonatas. Our opening sonata was that for cello and piano in A major, Op. 69. The cellist: Amanda Forsyth, a Canadian. The pianist: Shai Wosner, from Israel. Both of these have long experience in chamber music (and other music).
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
In 1815, the British and American navies were at war. The war in question was the economic warfare of British blockaders. It was backed by the naval strength that made possible attacks on American ports, with Mobile threatened as hostilities ended and, had the war continued, the prospect of attack on Charleston and Savannah. Moreover, British warships pursued American commerce-raiders.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
The Trumpian agenda to “Make America Great Again” emerged during the 2015–16 campaign and ensured Donald Trump’s nomination and his eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. This counterrevolutionary movement reflected the public’s displeasure with both the Obama administration’s hard swing to the left and the doctrinaire, anemic Republican reaction to it.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
The Chinese official, speaking at the Harvard Club in New York just before the turn of the century, was sobbing. The unnamed figure, recounts David M. Lampton in Living U.S.–China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War, started his talk by mentioning that he had just attended a ceremony commemorating the repatriation of the remains of an American aircrew whose plane went down during the Second World War in the Himalayas while on a supply mission to southwestern China.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
All those currents are still swirling in Great Britain. But the frisson of déjà vu doesn’t stop there. More than a decade ago, we had occasion to touch on the horrific story of Rotherham, the working-class South Yorkshire town where more than 1,400 girls—some as young as twelve—were systematically “groomed” and gang-raped by Muslim immigrants, mostly of Pakistani origin.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Victor Davis Hanson |Anthony Daniels |Eric Ormsby |James Panero
Savor this—a passage of published prose written by a full professor at a major university, cited in Leonard Cassuto’s new book Academic Writing as if Readers Matter:[S]tudents’ production of texts and professor and peer response to those texts . . .
