Archive

Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places where civilization has the most tenuous hold, including Dar es Salaam, Lusaka,...

The Hemingway style—terse, direct, formidable, in both prose and personal deportment—dominated American literature and the native ideal of manliness for much of the twentieth century. His suicide in 1961,...

Novelists, playwrights, and historians, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (1822–1896 and 1830–1870) were also the supreme chroniclers of the Parisian literary and artistic life of their time. The diary...

In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, the Enlightenment champion Lodovico Settembrini and the Jesuit communist Leo Naphta argue about nearly everything, including the modern project to conquer nature....

Miranda: “O wonder! . . . / O brave new world / That has such people in’t!”Prospero: “‘Tis new to thee.”  The great themes of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,...

The teachers you have make all the difference in your life. That they happened to come into your life at all and moved you to think and feel as...

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) belongs at the head of a select company of writers renowned in their day who are no longer taken seriously, or for that matter read much, by most adults...

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...