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Dec 10, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Anthony Daniels |Leszek Kolakowski |Douglas Murray
When Piotr Beczała took the stage at Carnegie Hall last night, he was greeted by huge applause—huge and sustained applause. This must be encouraging to a recitalist, even one as experienced and famous as Beczała. He is a Polish tenor, as you know, and he was accompanied by Helmut Deutsch, the veteran Austrian pianist. Deutsch is the regular accompanist of another tenor star, too: Jonas Kaufmann (a German). Both Beczała and Kaufmann know a good thing when they see or hear it.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Anthony Daniels |Leszek Kolakowski |Douglas Murray
Art:“House of David” inscribed on the Tel Dan Stele, 9th century B.C., Basalt. Collection of the Israel Antiques Authority. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Meidad Suchowolski. “Tel Dan Stele” at the Jewish Museum, New York (through January 5): Lacking hard evidence for the existence of King David, as well as various other biblical figures, modern scholars until recently considered much of the history recorded in the Old Testament to be literary invention.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Anthony Daniels |Douglas Murray |Leszek Kolakowski
Oliver Sacks’s Letters, at 752 pages, is anachronistic in two respects. First, there is the spectacle of six decades’ worth of correspondence, meticulously preserved (Oliver Sacks cloned every outgoing missive, whether by carbon copy, typewriter, or photocopier), tracking the growth and preoccupations of an intellectual giant.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Recent stories of note:“Lines of Insight”Stephen Smith, Literary ReviewPiet Mondrian is known, of course, for his red, yellow, and blue. And after he made the switch from Post-Impressionism to De Stijl, he apparently stuck to his guns: during the Blitz, when friends told him to flee London and head to the country, he replied, “It is too green.” A new biography tells the story of the idiosyncratic artist whose life, unlike Van Gogh or Caravaggio, has yet to capture the public imagination.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Frederick Seidel’s poems have been cranky, preposterous, but almost never stale, flat, or unprofitable. He enjoys that rare ability to surprise you with lines immediately memorable, yet unlike anyone else’s:Days of snow padded the sparking silence—still 1955—Of my friend’s Princeton dorm, empty at Christmas,No one around, the sound of Bach from somewhere,The smell of snow still falling, snow in my nostrils,Snow outside the windowsMy breath steamed up,A foghorn of silence inflaming the air.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Like its predecessor dedicated to a summer with Montaigne, Antoine Compagnon’s lively and charming A Summer with Pascal originated as a series on French radio. It is a work of haute vulgarisation, that is, of popularization informed by competency and erudition. It is written in admirably clear and elegant prose. Its author, Antoine Compagnon, is a member of the Académie française as well as a professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University (and a Proust scholar of some note).
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Virginia Nicholson is the veteran author of several enjoyable social histories of twentieth-century Britain.
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Jul 19, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |James Nuechterlein |Woody Allen
“Holy Delmore”David Mikics, TabletThe life story of the poet and writer Delmore Schwartz—from early acclaim to early death, with paranoia, cognitive distortions, and drug and alcohol addiction in the interim—often overshadows his actual work. It makes sense, then, that a biography of Schwartz appeared before a complete compendium of his poems. But thanks to the editor and poet Ben Mazer, we finally have the latter: The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz.
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Jul 16, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Bruce Bawer |Victor Davis Hanson |Gary Saul Morson
Art:Timeless Splendor: Dutch and Flemish Paintings from the Susan and Matthew Weatherbie Collection, edited by Peter C. Sutton (MFABoston): The Boston-based collectors Susan and Matthew Weatherbie write that, when educating themselves in the building of their collection of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, the imperative was not only to study “artists by reading books and catalogues” but also, “most important, . . .
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Jul 9, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |James Nuechterlein |Woody Allen
What if the Roman Empire had not remained Christian and instead returned to paganism? The course of nearly two thousand years of Western history would look very different indeed. A recent contribution to Yale’s series of Ancient Lives, Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor, asks just that question.
