James Penrose

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose

Recent stories of note: “‘Edgar Allan Poe’ Review: The Soul Within the Shadow” Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal Few American poems are so recognizable to the public as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” (Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is the other top contender.) And Poe’s dark short stories are nearly as well-known: think “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Cask of Amontillado.” Like Poe’s most famous works, his life was grim—plagued by alcoholism and riddled with lost loves—and brief, with...

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose

Our popular arts do not easily express faith. This is not only because of what artists choose as a subject but also the manner they adopt, and it isn’t a uniquely contemporary problem. When the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin stated that a “noble style” would apply to both house and church, he protested the British tendency to reserve the Gothic for their cathedrals and chapels.

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose

Alicia de Larrocha, the late Spanish pianist, introduced the world to a great deal of Spanish music. Not just music by relatively established composers, such as Albéniz, Granados, Falla, and Turina, but also the music of the less well established: Federico Mompou, Ernesto Halffter, Óscar Esplá, et al. We had Spanish singers too, spreading Spanish songs around the world. I think of three sopranos, in particular: Victoria de los Ángeles, Montserrat Caballé, and Pilar Lorengar.

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose

An early highlight of Broadway’s just-underway spring season is the finely wrought family drama Purpose (at the Hayes Theater through July 6), from the forty-year-old playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Jacobs-Jenkins has already won a mantel full of awards and had a hit with last year’s production of 2013’s Appropriate, which won him a Tony for Best Revival of a Play and which I regret having missed.

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |James Penrose

Although he is too modest to claim the honor for himself, Roger Chickering is in many ways the dean of American scholars of modern German history. For nearly half a century, he has produced imaginative and deeply researched monographs, meticulously peeling back the complexities of a society that was both astoundingly productive and at the same time deeply troubled and troubling.