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People can get used to most anything. Even the abyss may be rendered tolerable—or, for that matter, luxurious—furnished with creature comforts so that the unbearable truth of one’s condition...

Martin Heidegger is notorious for his embrace of Nazism in the 1930s. Yet he was a luminous commentator on the religious substance of modern poetry. Perhaps because of his...

Lawrence of Arabia: My Journey in Search of T. E. Lawrence by Ranulph Fiennes Pegasus Books, 352 pages, $32 In the literature of the First World War, full of...

Opera has traditionally had little interest in Christian orthodoxy, except as a foil for some preferred spiritual excellence. The lyric stage has concerned itself mostly with the political life...

Of the great nineteenth-century French novelists, Victor Hugo still enjoys a certain renown in America, thanks to the popularity of the musical version of Les Misérables, while Gustave Flaubert...

My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165, boundless curiosity, confidence, and mental energy, bold in the best sense, and...

Aldous Huxley was the premier twentieth-century English novelist of ideas, a rare calling among his countrymen; but perhaps it is in his non-fiction masterpiece, The Devils of Loudun (1952),...

When a man proclaims nature malignant in all its parts and professes to hate life itself, one’s first suspicion is that something is profoundly wrong with him. The man’s...

The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudanby Winston Spencer Churchilledited by James W. Mullerst. Augustine’s, two volumes, 1,556 pages, $155 Small wars, the kind...

There are holy days of sobering solemnity when one is meant to reflect on the sadness of life, the weakness of human nature, the vast distance between who you...

In the popular understanding of Christmas, Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella looms large. A Christmas Carol seems to represent not only Christmassy warmth, fellowship, and cheer, but the very essence...

I wandered lonely as a cloud.” So begins a famous poem of William Wordsworth’s, one that was often taught to schoolchildren back when memorizing poetry was part of education....

The Russian soul. The phrase serves as shorthand for Russia’s national character, after the manner of American innocence, French arrogance, Italian dolce far niente, and what used to be...

The Norwegian master Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) is and will remain the most important modern playwright—which is not to say there are no flaws in his work. Of all artists,...

The term poète maudit, or “cursed poet,” was coined by Paul Verlaine. His little book Les poètes maudits (1884) interleaved his own honorific prose with poems by some of...