Not a find, but an old friend, is Malcolm Muggeridge.  I am reading a collection of his essays called Time and Eternity, and his golden spiritual autobiography, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, written after he and his wife, past their four-score years, had been received into the Catholic Church.  I cannot read the latter without...

America’s Political Inventors: The Lost Art of Legislation, by George W. Liebmann (New York: I.B. Tauris; 272 pp., £64.00).  George Liebmann, an attorney and historian, argues that Friedrich Hayek’s definition of the rule of law (“uniform rules laid down in advance”) has not been observed recently by federal and state governments.  Learned Hand said that...

From the late 19th or early 20th century down to the present day, liberalism has been progressively oriented to psychology and therapeutic technique.  Yet advanced liberalism in the 21st century is as materialist a creed as classical liberalism was in the 19th, and liberal psychology remains as firmly grounded in a materialist philosophy as it...

The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and Peace, by David B. Woolner (New York: Basic Books; 368 pp., $32.00).  The author of this engaging, highly interesting, and extremely well-written book is senior fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian at the Roosevelt Institute, in addition to holding academic professorships at both Marist and Bard College. ...

From the February 2014 issue of Chronicles. The elegant duplex maisonette at 73 East 73rd Street in Manhattan, formerly the residence of the late Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr., was recently bought by Mr. and Mrs. Mark Rockefeller, son and daughter-in-law of the late Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.  A writer for the New York...

The liberal print media, like all things liberal, are never more themselves than when searching out, discovering, and deploring violence in America—gun violence, police violence, violence against women, violence against children, violence against racial and ethnic minorities, violence against immigrants, violence against Muslims, violence against homosexuals and “transgender people,” violence against foreign countries and cultures,...

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.” —Flannery O’Connor Patricia Snow cites the sentence above, taken from O’Connor’s introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, in a brilliant essay that appeared recently in First Things (“Empathy...

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, by Mark Lilla (New York: HarperCollins; 160 pp., $24. 99).  Professor Lilla’s book, which appeared originally as an essay in the New York Review of Books, has received much attention (almost all of it bad) from liberals angered by its thesis that identity politics as it has...

When I was in my teens I read a good deal in the realist school of American fiction: Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and so on.  As a more mature reader, I found their work hopelessly dreary, dull, and dead.  Much later I discovered the French realist novelists of the second half of the...

When I was growing up in Manhattan the generational text for the generation immediately before mine was The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.  My tastes in high school ran to Thomas Wolfe (of course), Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Faulkner, etc., and I took it actually as both a point and...

Beethoven’s Symphonies: Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas, by Martin Geck, trans. by Stewart Spencer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 197 pp., $26.00).  Beethoven wrote his nine symphonies between 1800 and 1824 at the height of the Romantic movement that overlapped the end of the Enlightenment.  In Professor Geck’s opinion, the “First Symphony marks the...

I’ve at times found the great English writer and apologist G.K. Chesterton wearisome for his seemingly unending parade of paradoxes, some of which strike me as the discovery of paradoxes for paradox’s sake.  Yet paradox, as Peter Kreeft notes in his Foreword to ABCs of the Christian Life: The Ultimate Anthology of the Prince of...

David Brooks devotes his column in the New York Times today (22 September 2017) to a generous appreciation of Sam Francis, whom he calls “one of the most prescient writers of the past 50 years.” Francis’s name surfaced unexpectedly during the presidential campaign last year when the media took note of the role he and his...

From the August 2014 issue of Chronicles. The modern world abounds in modern heresies.  One might say that modernity itself is a heresy—modernity understood in the broadest possible terms as the antithesis of the traditional: the fundamental distinction, as Claude Polin recently argued in this magazine, overlying all subordinate political and cultural oppositions, beginning with...