Alan Jacobs

George Eliot: The Last Victorian By Kathryn Hughes Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 400 pp. $30 On the second day of January 1842, in a mild corner of the English Midlands, a young woman of twenty-two named Mary Ann Evans refused to attend church with her father. “Robert Evans’ . . . . Continue Reading »

In the spring of 1936, the British Council invited Rebecca West to lecture in Yugoslavia. Thanks to the rise of the Nazis and the ongoing depredations of Stalinism, tensions were rising in the Balkans—as if they had not historically been high enough. West wrote to an official of the Council that . . . . Continue Reading »

By now most readers in this country are aware of what has come to be called the Harry Potter phenomenon. It’s hard to be unaware. Any bookstore you might care to enter is strewn with giant stacks of the Harry Potter books—three of them now that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has . . . . Continue Reading »

American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Michael Warner Library of America 939 pp. $40 Most of us are familiar with the story of the “two cultures,” as C. P. Snow called it, or, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, “the divorce between the sciences and the humanities.” . . . . Continue Reading »

American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Michael Warner. Library of America. 939 pp. $40 Most of us are familiar with the story of the “two cultures,” as C. P. Snow called it, or, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, “the divorce between the sciences and the humanities.” . . . . Continue Reading »

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch Allen Lane/Penguin, 546 pages, $37.95 It is time to begin assessing Iris Murdoch’s remarkable and difficult-to-categorize career”and not, or not strictly, because she will soon enter her ninth decade. . . . . Continue Reading »

Le Ton Beau de Marot:In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter Basic Books, 632 pages, $30 Connection, linkage: this is the great task of modernist aesthetics. “Only connect!” thinks a character in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End . “The ordinary man,” . . . . Continue Reading »

People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture by David Lyle Jeffrey Eerdmans, 396 pages, $37 In the common caricature, all disputes between Catholics and Protestants can be reduced to a dispute over the role of Scripture: the Protestant cries Sola Scriptura ; the Catholic understands . . . . Continue Reading »

In a famous passage from Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead gives this counsel to scholars in the various historical disciplines: “Do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which [controversialists] feel it necessary explicitly to defend.” More . . . . Continue Reading »

On public television and the educational cable channels, the current rage seems to be for documentaries showing animals eating other animals. And to judge by the number of ads I see inviting people to order videotapes, the regularly scheduled predation doesn’t offer enough carnage for the viewing . . . . Continue Reading »