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2 weeks 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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2 weeks 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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2 weeks 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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2 weeks 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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2 weeks 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.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
With an immense literary production and his remarkable public presence, Victor Hugo (1802–85) remains best known in the Anglophone world for his novels. But he was also a poet, playwright, politician, literary critic, and—perhaps least known—a visual artist. One of the foremost figures of Romanticism, with a reputation owing as much to his complex character as to the formal aspects of his work, Hugo’s presence towered over European cultural life for much of the nineteenth century.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
Charles Dickens, that quintessential Victorian novelist, was actually born seven years before Princess Victoria, in 1812—for comparison, Madison was then in the White House—and was already twenty-five when she became queen, having lived through the last years of George III and the entire reigns of George IV and William IV. He was an infant at the time of the Luddite riots and three years old when the Battle of Waterloo was fought.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
Francis Phelan—Ironweed—was a professional ballplayer, and a good one, too, with a strong arm. So when he threw a rock at a pre–World War I strikebreaker and hit him in the head, it is no surprise that the target died, Francis’s first homicide. Later, his newborn son slipped from his diaper and broke his neck as Francis held him. Francis insisted he was not drunk but just tired. He fled anyway.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
We are, to be candid, of two minds about such lists. Recitations that so-and-so begat thus-and-such who begat what’s-his-name often fail to grip. That said, it is with great pleasure that we arrive at the end of each publishing season and embark on our own catalogue, not of ships, exactly, but of those who make The New Criterion possible.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
As the chief speechwriter for nearly the entirety of Ronald Reagan’s two terms, Anthony R. “Tony” Dolan will probably be remembered most for his work during the 1980s.
