Keith Windschuttle

2 weeks ago | newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |Keith Windschuttle

Nonfiction: The Highland Clans, by Alistair Moffat (Thames & Hudson): To Sir Walter Scott, Scotland was the “Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,/ Land of the mountain and the flood.” To his English contemporary Sydney Smith, it was “That knuckle-end of England—that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur.” To Robert Louis Stevenson, a native son of Edinburgh, it was simply “indefinable.” And if Scotland is cryptic, how stranger still are the Highlands, that wild and vast region far outside...

2 weeks ago | newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |Keith Windschuttle

“John Adams (b. 1947) is among the most celebrated composers active today.” I have quoted program notes from the Metropolitan Opera. And it is true. Who else is as celebrated as Adams? As visible (or audible, since we are talking about composers)? Philip Glass. John Williams (who is known primarily for movie music, of course).

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | Roger Kimball |Gary Saul Morson |Renee Winegarten |Keith Windschuttle

Recent stories of note:“A Novelist Draws”Rupert Christiansen, Literary ReviewOn the island of Guernsey is a home whose owner, it is evident, was fond of excess and whimsy: walls adorned floor to ceiling with china, ceilings fitted with tapestries, ornament and pattern everywhere possible. This is the Hauteville House, the home of Victor Hugo during his exile on the Channel Islands, which is open to the public, as is the author’s equally eccentric home in Paris.

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | Roger Kimball |Gary Saul Morson |Renee Winegarten |Keith Windschuttle

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was the most exquisite of Old Masters: he portrayed the melancholy sense that elegant pleasures are fleeting and condemned to fade. No wonder that covers of Mozart albums have been decorated with Watteau’s pictures. The Château de Chantilly’s Musée Condé holds ten Watteaus, France’s largest collection of the artist’s work outside of the Louvre.

2 months ago | newcriterion.com | Keith Windschuttle |Roger Kimball |Renee Winegarten |Brenda Wineapple

Poetry: Daniel Mendelsohn in conversation with Ayad Akhtar: Homer’s The Odyssey, at the 92nd Street Y (April 10): Threads from Homer’s Odyssey are “so tightly woven into the fabric of our literature and art, music and drama,” notes the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, that “it’s with a start that we recall someone had to invent them.” It’s easy to forget that each generation has to retranslate the poem, too, if those threads are to be discerned (at least until Ancient Greek makes its way into...