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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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Mar 4, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | David Pryce-Jones
The SIS Building (or MI6 Building) at Vauxhall Cross, 2015, London. Photo: Laurie Nevay, Wikipedia. The SIS Building (or MI6 Building) at Vauxhall Cross, 2015, London. Photo: Laurie Nevay, Wikipedia.
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Oct 18, 2023 | 
newcriterion.com | David Pryce-Jones
“Tout est perdu fors l’honneur” (All is lost save honor), François I, King of France, is supposed to have written after the battle of Pavia in 1525. Never-say-die defiance of this sort has a mythmaking quality that contributes to the way the French nation would like to perceive itself. In the summer of 1940, the German army took six short weeks to conquer France. For whatever political, social, or military reason, the French by and large did not have the honor of fighting for their country.
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Oct 16, 2023 | 
newcriterion.com | David Pryce-Jones
Could Goebbels have been compensating for some inadequacy? One of six children of humble parents, he had a difficult start in life. In particular he suffered from a neurogenic clubfoot. An unsuccessful operation left him permanently lame. A dissatisfied student, Goebbels tried his hand at novellas, lyric poetry, and a dramatization for the stage of the story of Judas Iscariot. None of this was good enough to find a publisher.
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Oct 9, 2023 | 
newcriterion.com | David Pryce-Jones
In 1962, aged twenty-five, I went to Israel to write the book that was published three years later under the title, Next Generation. This was a golden age when it was possible to have Jewish and Arab friends. I made regular visits to the Arab Jewish Community Centre in Haifa, whose director Yaakov Malkin, born in Warsaw in 1927, was a typical Israeli intellectual, able and willing to discuss every topic under the sun.
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Oct 7, 2023 | 
newcriterion.com | David Pryce-Jones
As dawn broke this morning, Hamas, the party that has been in power in Gaza since 2007, launched a coordinated attack by land, air, and sea that has taken Israel by surprise. At this stage estimates must be uncertain, but reports say that Hamas has fired several thousand rockets into Israel. At least one hundred civilians are reported dead and hundreds more wounded.
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Aug 23, 2023 | 
newcriterion.com | David Pryce-Jones
Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) is a writer who will be read as long as there is anyone interested in English literature. His early novels have a comic spirit all their own. In contrast, Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Sword of Honour (1952–61) capture England at a time in her history when peace was giving way to war and the old social order was vanishing. Waugh was a voice speaking for the past, going against the grain of modernity, and this brought into question what kind of a man could he be.
