The New Criterion

2 days ago | newcriterion.com | Kyle Smith |Robert Erickson |James Bowman |Douglas Murray

T-shirts for sale in the lobby at Angry Alan, the new play by Penelope Skinner (at the Studio Seaview through August 3) are printed with the legend “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” Experience suggested I turn around and leave immediately, but duty compelled me to stay. The slogan comes up during the play, which is a sort of stage equivalent of a feminist T-shirt.

2 days ago | newcriterion.com | Mark Judge |Robert Erickson |James Bowman |Douglas Murray

Sally Quinn won’t return my emails. Perhaps Quinn, the doyenne of Washington, D.C., and the widow of the Washington Post legend Ben Bradlee, is overwrought. As she recently lamented in The New York Times, her city is under siege:This spring Washington is a city in crisis. Physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. It’s as if the fragrant air were permeated with an invisible poison, as if we were silently choking on carbon monoxide.

1 week ago | newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Robert Erickson |Frank Johnson |Moira Hodgson

Nonfiction:Bookish Words & Their Surprising Stories, by David Crystal (Bodleian Library Publishing, June 20): What’s your favorite boc? Originally, the Old English word that has since become our “book” referred to any written text, including legal documents, catalogues, or charters. And rather than a library, English speakers once spoke of a boc-hord, or a “book hoard,” which may be the more accurate term for the less organized among us.

2 weeks ago | newcriterion.com | Paul du Quenoy |Douglas Murray |Hilton Kramer |Robert Erickson

Rare is the opera that continues to be performed in two languages, but the exigencies of the Paris Opera have imprinted that legacy on a handful of works. Many are mid-nineteenth-century Italian stalwarts that were introduced in French to conquer what Walter Benjamin identified as “the capital of the nineteenth century.”We normally call Giuseppe Verdi’s great opera of religion and power Don Carlo, without the s. But with the added letter, the connoisseur knows he is getting the French version.

3 weeks ago | newcriterion.com | Suzanna Murawski |Robert Erickson |Douglas Murray |Emma Richards

Recent stories of note: “Land of Dopes & Tories” Piers Brendon, Literary Review Arthur Christopher Benson was the master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1915 to 1925 and is known for penning the lyrics of “Land of Hope and Glory,” as well as for light, belletristic essays aimed toward, in his words, “a feminine tea-party kind of an audience.” Still, he aspired to something greater—an aspiration that, as Piers Brendon writes in Literary Review, Benson has posthumously achieved with two...