“Hail, happy Britain! Highly favored isle, And Heaven’s peculiar care!”—William Somerville British conservative circles are awash with books at the moment. Apart from the usual think-tank reports and surveys, we have seen recently John Major’s and Norman Lamont’s memoirs, John Redwood’s Death of Britain, and the latest miscellany from Daily Telegraph...

Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Boston University, has produced a beautifully written work. His book is intended to refute every objection to the more or less universally accepted doctrine of evolution, to discredit its opponents, and to assert the compatibility of strict evolutionary doctrine with religion. Ever since Darwin—and especially since the rise...

The cinematographer, the director’s collaborator and confidant, uses the lens, camera, and lighting equipment to make the fake look real and the real authentic. He creates the visual appearance and style of the film. Freddie Young (1902-98), combining stamina and discipline, was perhaps the greatest cinematographer of the century. The youngest son of a large...

A wash in reviews of Cornwell’s portrait of Pius XII, I felt surfeited by the book even before it arrived in the mail. To call this biography unflattering is meiosis. John Lukacs is right to say that, while Cornwell’s production is being featured by the History Book of the Month Club, history itself is what...

Making a Killing, which may be the most influential anti-gun book ever written, could not have been better timed to the current wave of lawsuits against gun companies, since many of the legal claims closely resemble the charges that Tom Diaz makes against the gun industry. Moreover, the book will likely help shape public opinion...

        “A shriller note could now be heard rising from Sir Alastair’s rooms; any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it; it is the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass.”—Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall Two vignettes illustrate Evelyn Waugh’s character. One has to...

        “Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge This remarkable French mathematician has written extensively on what he considers the fundamental spiritual problem of our day, the perversion of language, which he...

Emeritus professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, Robert B. Heilman has been publishing for over 60 years and has done distinguished work on drama and fiction. A good book of literary terms, for instance, refers to his Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (1968) under the word “melodrama.” When you become...

A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny is a pamphlet and a history. Some of the greatest compositions of the human mind were cast in the form of pamphlets, even when they were thrown at a public for immediate political purposes. There is nothing very wrong with Buchanan’s pamphlet, which consists of two of...

        —”Imperialism is absolutely necessary to a people which desires spiritual as well as economic expansion. —Benito Mussolini America has survived, the Last and Only Superpower, while so many others have fallen by the wayside, their bones littering the road from empire: Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, and—closest to ourselves—a once-great Britain,...

John T. Flynn had the distinction of being singled out by Franklin D. Roosevelt as a writer who “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.” Until the New Deal came along, however, Flynn had never been known as a conservative. During the 1920’s, he served...

James Bohan, a Pennsylvania attorney, believes he has elevated the abortion debate above the pedestrian levels of both medicine and religion. However, Mr. Bohan rises above faith and science only to fall back on the well-worn cliches of human rights doctrines found in the sacred texts of the Declaration of Independence, the writings of Albert...

        “A Conservative is only a Tory who is ashamed of himself.” —J. Hookham Frère Plans to shuck the Tory Party’s sacred name rattled the young Disraeli, who remarked that the replacement name, Conservative, sounded to him like “the invention of some pastry chef.” Similarly, paleoconservatism conjures up the image—in my mind,...

In a regional literary world ripe with poseurs, Ivan Doig may be the true descendant of Wallace Stegner. Unlike the typical carpetbagger who begins with preconceived notions as to the nature of the “real” West, Doig actually grew up here during an unforgiving time when the place was good for nothing except for what could...

The most important book ever published about firearms policy is John Lott’s superb More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. No other firearms book has reshaped the political debate so profoundly or its author been subjected to such a determined campaign of lies and libels. The intensity of the campaign against Lott...

        “Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.” —Thomas Babington For those readers who know very much about Niccolo Machiavelli, the most striking feature of Michael Ledeen’s new book, which tries to explicate a number of...

        “War is war. Guns are not just for decoration.” —V.I. Lenin By March 1920, Russia’s whites—an odd and disparate conglomeration of monarchists, anti-Bolshevik socialists, jaded liberals, reactionary clerics, frightened nobles, disinherited landowners, and loyalist army officers and soldiers—had turned what looked like certain victory over the Reds into an ignominious defeat....

Once, in a Paris bookstore, biographer Leon Edel heard Ernest Hemingway’s take on T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. “Camels!” bellowed Papa. “Camels!” In his new book, Thomas McGuane has given us Horses! Horses! There is a theory that the artist who invests too much intellectual capital in the pursuit of sport or hobbies cheapens,...

A good historian ought to make it clear where he is coming horn rather than assume an impossible Olympian objectivity. Then, if he has handled his evidence honestly, he has fulfilled the demands of his craft—whether or not we agree with the interpretation he has placed upon his evidence. Ideally, interpretation should come separately from,...

        “Trade is a social act.” —John Stuart Mill If only all of John Gray’s False Dawn were as good as the first two pages of Chapter 6! In them, our author succinctly and accurately diagnoses why communism in Soviet Russia failed. “Between 1918 and 1921,” Mr. Gray writes, the Bolsheviks attempted...

David Vital describes his work as a political history, whose subject is the exercise of legitimate violence. He recounts how the Jews of Europe addressed the political crisis that overtook them between the end of the ancien regime in 1789 and the collapse of their rebuilt social order in Europe in 1939: His subject is...

Sideswiped by a car, Randall Jarrell died 34 years ago at the age of 51. That he has remained a presence as a writer and even as a man is vividly testified to by these books, which bring back a lot of memories, and different kinds of memories. Randall Jarrell was a force, even a...

The American short story is moribund. The passing of giants (Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw, Peter Taylor) has relegated the form to the purgatory of academic hackdom and its innumerable ideological ax-grinders paying homage to a plethora of multicultural grievances. In the 1980’s, we had a short story “renaissance” of sorts (so,...

        “[Socialism is] the combination of religious sentimentality, industrial insanity, and moral obliquity.” —F.J.C. Heamshaw Some years ago, George Watson wrote two remarkable articles for Chronicles describing how the Soviets, those heroes of socialist resistance to fascism, carried on using German concentration camps for their original purposes until the early 50’s (“Buchenwald’s...

        “How can tyrants safely govern home I Unless abroad they purchase great alliance?”—William Shakespeare There is something compelling in reading about spies and something compelling as well about spying, or we would not have so many spies to read about, fictional or not. Our century has been a century of spies:...

Robert Weissberg produced the present volume, on the concept and practice of empowerment, almost simultaneously with another monograph, on tolerance, published last year. Both studies highlight the difference between a political ideal and its grim result—that is, between what people are told the ideal consists of and what they ultimately get. In Political Tolerance, Weissberg...

        “The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas.”—Joseph Addison This is the first critical study of M.E. Bradford, whose untimely death in 1993 silenced the most eloquent voice ever raised on behalf of the permanent things as they are revealed in the Southern tradition. It would be a...

A compelling personal narrative about his inner life serves as the occasion for David Klinghoffer to engage in a dialogue with Judaism. His story, weaving the personal with the public, carries him from adoption by a Reform Jewish couple in California to deep reflection on the meaning of “being Jewish” and the interplay of family...

There are many good writers active these days, certainly more than enough to keep you busy—if you can identify them. That’s not so easy to do, because the ones who are promoted (make that “expensively touted”) are usually (a euphemism for “almost always”) not the ones to spend time with. As a rule of thumb,...

The Golden Year of the Golden Age of Hollywood was, perhaps, 1939. Amongst its many films that have since become classics—including Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame—was the first (and best) version of James Hilton’s novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips. The film (like the book)...

The late 1940’s and early 1950’s were the heyday of rhythm-and-blues. Singers like Charles Brown, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Amos Milburn, James Brown, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and others like them were becoming acknowledged masters of the genre, all with readily identifiable musical personalities, while such older big-band blues shouters as Wynonie Harris, Jimmy Witherspoon, Eddie...

The more a man of the world looks at the world, the more he is persuaded that not only are its political and social truths rarely what they seem, they are often the diametrical opposite of what they seem. So, in one memorable episode, did many an Englishman, a copy of the Times in one...

Morgan Norval shares with this reviewer one characteristic both of us may soon have cause to regret: We live near Washington, D.C., one of the prime candidates for a major terrorist attack with unconventional weapons in the near future, an attack in which the victims will be numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Among those...

        “When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.” —John Adams...

        “Humanity must remain as it is.” -Pope Leo XIII A sad thing about being American is that patriotism has never had much of a chance to find genuine expression in our souls, we having been taught that Americanism has to do with a love of our republican system of law and...

Dear Norman, This is the second (and probably the last) time I have written to you. The first time was way back in tumultuous 1968 when, as a kind of review of your book Making It, for the Hollins Critic, I wrote you an open letter entitled “My Silk Purse and Yours; Making It, Starring...

        “Slavery is as ancient as war, and war as human nature.” —Voltaire Americans, with their strong tendency to externalize the evil within them and to project it onto others, have been waging crusades to extirpate or crush one kind of evil or another for almost 200 years now. The Pelagian belief...

Professor Edmunds’ study is welcome for several reasons, not the least of which is that it is the revised edition of his The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization (1981). That noble and instructive volume was much too good to disappear into oblivion. The centrality of its topic and the originality of his treatment...

“The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government and self-development with him wherever he goes.” —Henry Ward Beecher For almost exactly 30 years, Kevin P. Phillips has been cranking out some of the most interesting and provocative works of political analysis written since World War II. In 1969, The Emerging Republican Majority argued that American politics runs through periodic...

In recent years, there has been a spate of valuable books on Soviet espionage, subversion, and penetration of the West—books inspired or prompted by the opening of Soviet secret files, the publication of the Venona intercepts (communications between Soviet agents and Moscow), and the writings of former KGB officials. Among these are Stephen Koch’s Double...

Wendell Berry is, without doubt, the poetic star of environmentalism. I do not know of any other poet of his stature in the present or past who has taken his stand, as the Agrarians said they did, and stood by it so steadfastly into his 60’s. In fact, his farmer-poet representation of himself may be...

        “Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Most Americans, whether they know it or not, are already well acquainted with lost causes; as for the rest, they have only to wait, perhaps for just a little while. T.S. Eliot thought no...

Anyone entertaining an unpleasant thought about the Clinton White House is almost certainly a victim of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” which Mrs. Clinton (formerly Ms. Rodham-Clinton) has blamed for her husband’s travails. For many years, the Clintons have used the word “children” as an odd euphemism for “government,” Joycelyn Elders and Marian Wright Edelman being...

        “The remembrance of death, like all other blessings, is a gift of God: otherwise how is it that often when we are by the very tombs, we are left tearless and hard?” —St. John of the Ladder More than 20 years ago, I was counseled by an orthodox Roman Catholic professor...

Monsignor Ronald Knox, when asked to conduct a baptismal service in the English language, replied that the Devil knew Latin, thus supplying a title for this lively, informative, and intelligent book. Many of its chapters have already appeared in periodicals, particularly Chronicles and Academic Questions. But five of them have been made by the addition...

What is it about Ayn Rand that so fascinates her enemies as well as her admirers? Her two major novels, Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943), are enduring pillars of popular culture. Her paeans to egoism make Nietzsche look like a piker, and, quite unlike that sickly aesthete, she had a life as dramatic...

Women of the younger, liberated generation have been raised to believe that being equal to men means being the same as men. Thus, they try hard to convince themselves that casual sex is harmless “fun” as long as they “play it safe.” In A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit presents the...

The introductory chapter of The Shadow University contains a powerful indictment of contemporary higher education. Kors and Silverglate get it right when they characterize university administrators as “careerists who have made a Faustian deal.” They are correct as well about the professorial, political, and cultural pressures that have turned institutions of learning into conduits of...