Helen Andrews

I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. Let me rephrase that. I know why. Fourteen thousand copies a year, practically indefinitely, is why. There’s a lot of money at stake, for them and for . . . . Continue Reading »

There is more fiction than non-fiction on this list, but that’s only because my non-fiction reading this year has been dominated by a succession of esoteric obsessions. I encountered some very good books that way, but the mini-reviews for all of them would have gone something like “A . . . . Continue Reading »

Noah Millman thinks he has located the essence of the conservative temperament in the works of Leo Tolstoy, which is hard to believe. Perhaps you know the old joke about the tenure committee’s verdict on Jesus Christ. (“A fine teacher but didn’t publish.”) Tolstoy’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Every swinger, wife-swapper, and key-party enthusiast in the Seventies knew all about Margaret Mead and her liberated South Seas islanders, but I bet that not even a dozen had so much as heard of Fanny Wright or John Humphrey Noyes. That seems to be the way it is with people in the grip of a . . . . Continue Reading »

My review of Prof. Joseph Crespino’s new biography of Strom Thurmond is in the current edition of National Review : The black comedian Dick Gregory said in 1971 that race relations in America were easy to understand: “In the North they don’t care how big I get, long as I . . . . Continue Reading »

From Without a Stitch in Time , a Peter De Vries short story collection: “What I’m going to do is, I’m going to declare moral bankruptcy,” I said. “I mean, we keep using the term in that sense, why not follow it through? When a man can no longer discharge his financial . . . . Continue Reading »

As far as I know, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Catholic Writers is the only book of literary criticism ever to be responsible for a war. It was on the basis of this book that Dag Hammarskjöld plucked its author from the Irish delegation at . . . . Continue Reading »

All absolutisms, appropriately enough, are not created equal. It is possible for a man to support one despot but condemn another, or to be a thoroughgoing monarchist at home and a republican elsewhere. A French aristocrat might go to Tsarist Russia and say, with perfect consistency, “I am a . . . . Continue Reading »

When I read Rebecca West’s description of the folk costume of Albanian men, I assumed she was lying or at least exaggerating: No Westerner ever sees an Albanian for the first time without thinking that the poor man’s trousers are just about to drop off. They are cut in a straight line . . . . Continue Reading »

African literature has done a great deal to form the conventional wisdom about the cultural side of colonialism, that conventional wisdom being that African societies used to be communitarian, spiritual, and close to nature, but then these virtues were eroded by contact with the individualistic, . . . . Continue Reading »