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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
In 1815, the British and American navies were at war. The war in question was the economic warfare of British blockaders. It was backed by the naval strength that made possible attacks on American ports, with Mobile threatened as hostilities ended and, had the war continued, the prospect of attack on Charleston and Savannah. Moreover, British warships pursued American commerce-raiders.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
The Trumpian agenda to “Make America Great Again” emerged during the 2015–16 campaign and ensured Donald Trump’s nomination and his eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. This counterrevolutionary movement reflected the public’s displeasure with both the Obama administration’s hard swing to the left and the doctrinaire, anemic Republican reaction to it.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
The Chinese official, speaking at the Harvard Club in New York just before the turn of the century, was sobbing. The unnamed figure, recounts David M. Lampton in Living U.S.–China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War, started his talk by mentioning that he had just attended a ceremony commemorating the repatriation of the remains of an American aircrew whose plane went down during the Second World War in the Himalayas while on a supply mission to southwestern China.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
All those currents are still swirling in Great Britain. But the frisson of déjà vu doesn’t stop there. More than a decade ago, we had occasion to touch on the horrific story of Rotherham, the working-class South Yorkshire town where more than 1,400 girls—some as young as twelve—were systematically “groomed” and gang-raped by Muslim immigrants, mostly of Pakistani origin.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
When in the dying days of 2024, the former president Jimmy Carter also expired, aged one hundred, the considered judgment on his presidency of many media observers agreed with mine, as expressed in these pages almost two years ago when he entered hospice care (see “The last of America” in The New Criterion of April 2023). On that occasion, I wrote that Mr. Carter was a good man but a bad president, and that the two things just might be related.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
Under the vault of light-bluemorning sky, on an ash-gray hillI saw the image of a horse,gigantic, the sinewy neck and flank;and all from mane to hoof clear-cut,cast against the broad side of a barn. This shape loomed before I saw the horsestanding below, golden—yet trivial. Little was left of winter but bare bonesthat day. I missed my parents, long dead,and grieved for my distant children.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
Poor Max Boot. By his own telling, he began working on his ambitious, now newly published biography of Ronald Reagan in 2013, when he was still a Reagan-admiring neoconservative in good standing.1 But then came Donald Trump, who fried Boot’s brain along with those of numerous other neoconservative grandees who took it personally that Trump called out their foreign-policy failures and won the Republican nomination without their permission or approval.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Lipsky |Carl Rollyson |Anthony Daniels
It was very cold in New York last night, meaning that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra should have felt right at home. The CSO played a concert in Carnegie Hall. On the podium was its music director emeritus—for life: Riccardo Muti. He began with the overture to Norma, the opera by Bellini. Have you ever heard it in concert? I hadn’t either. Many people think that bel canto is stupid. And it’s not necessarily their fault. It’s the fault of conductors who conduct it stupidly—flaccidly, blandly.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Anthony Daniels |Pat Lipsky |Theodore Dalrymple |Carl Rollyson
Art:Piet Mondrian, Summer, Dune in Zeeland, ca. 1910, Oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. “Piet Mondrian: Ever further,” at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (through April 20, 2025): Thanks to Hilla Rebay’s keen eye, the Guggenheim has a marvelous collection, Solomon having started out with such heavyweights as Kandinsky, Chagall, and Modigliani. Now, the Guggenheim has begun a series of exhibitions to make sure its permanent collection actually gets to museumgoers.
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Jan 20, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Anthony Daniels |Pat Lipsky |Theodore Dalrymple |Carl Rollyson
“Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael” is a tightly curated look into the influence and mastery the three Renaissance artists exerted as their lives and work intersected in early sixteenth-century Florence. Running through February 16 at the Royal Academy in London, the exhibition is as much about the individuals’ artistic processes as it is about the legacy of the Italian Renaissance.
