Joseph Epstein

Dec 9, 2024 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Joseph Epstein |William Voegeli |Martha Bayles

Example, an old adage has it, is not proof. But then, apart from mathematics and litigation, proof is not everywhere required, while examples have various uses. “Example is the school of mankind,” wrote Edmund Burke, “and they learn at no other.” In his book Farnsworth’s Classical English Style (2020), Ward Farnsworth holds that “examples show how principles work, and the principles can be adapted to less dramatic settings.

Apr 28, 2024 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Joseph Epstein |Allen C. Guelzo |Daniel Mahoney |Forrest Nabors

I thought that I had formed an idea of ancient Rome but I had done nothing of the kind. I had not a notion of such magnificence. —George Gissing, in a letter to his sister MargaretWe know a vast deal about the history of Rome and yet there remains so much we do not know. Mary Beard reports in her new book, Emperor of Rome, that the teenage emperor Elagabulus—who ruled from A.D. 218 to 222, his reign ending with his assassination at age 18—may have invented the whoopee cushion.

Jan 16, 2024 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Joseph Epstein |David Schaefer |Diana Schaub |Algis Valiunas

Theodor Mommsen’s fame during his lifetime was such that it earned the awe of even so skeptical an observer as Mark Twain. In one of his newsletters to America, Twain, while in Berlin, describes attending a student dinner when Mommsen arrived in the hall. Twain writes:Then there was an excited whisper at our table—“Mommsen!”—and the whole house rose. Rose and shouted and stamped and clapped, and banged the beer mugs….

Apr 20, 2023 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Diana Schaub |Mark Helprin |Joseph Epstein

Harvey C. Mansfield’s 2006 book, Manliness, was a response to the gender-neutral society. Bold, stark, no subtitle: simply Manliness. Seventeen years and several twists in the sexual revolution later, it is time to revisit his argument. Has gender-neutrality become so dominant that we must now banish the word “manliness” from our vocabulary? In keeping with the Harvard government professor’s forthrightness, our theme is how manliness is faring under the contemporary regime of gender-neutrality.

Mar 14, 2023 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Charles Kesler |Christopher Caldwell |Joseph Epstein

There are many reasons to sympathize with young conservatives who have grown up in modern, or worse, in postmodern, America. Surrounded by on-demand and even no-demand pornography, the Muzak of their era, and schooled on the supercilious condemnation of virtue, white males, and American history in particular, they are barely acquainted with the America that decades ago enjoyed a much healthier moral and intellectual culture.