New York Review of Books

T. S. Eliot’s ‘Is That All There Is?’

In The Idea Of A Christian Society, T. S. Eliot wrote: Was our society, which had always been assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compoundContinue reading “T. S. Eliot’s ‘Is That All There Is?’”

Late Work And Shying Away From Decay And Death

In ‘Late Francis Bacon: Spirit and Substance‘ Colm Tóibín writes: It would be easy to imagine…that Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was written toward the end of his life. In fact, it was written in 1911, when Mann was thirty-six. It is a young man’s book; its images of desire, decay, and death could not be soContinue reading “Late Work And Shying Away From Decay And Death”

Virginia Woolf On Autobiography And Not Writing ‘Directly About The Soul’

In Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature, (New York Review of Books, 13 August, 2015), Joyce Carol Oates writes: [Virginia] Woolf suggests the power of a different sort of inspiration, the sheerly autobiographical—the work created out of intimacy with one’s own life and experience….What is required, beyond memory, is a perspective on one’s ownContinue reading “Virginia Woolf On Autobiography And Not Writing ‘Directly About The Soul’”

Reinhold Niebuhr On The Ethical Permissibility Of Political Violence

In reviewing Reinhold Niebuhr‘s Major Works on Religion and Politics, Adam Kirsch makes note of the following passage from Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society: If a season of violence can establish a just social system and can create the possibilities of its preservation, there is no purely ethical reason upon which violence and revolution can be ruledContinue reading “Reinhold Niebuhr On The Ethical Permissibility Of Political Violence”

Pigliucci And Shaw On The Allegedly Useful Reduction

Massimo Pigliucci critiques the uncritical reductionism that the conflation of philosophy and science brings in its wake, using as a jumping-off point, Tamsin Shaw’s essay in the New York Review of Books, which addresses psychologists’ claims “that human beings are not rational, but rather rationalizing, and that one of the things we rationalize most about isContinue reading “Pigliucci And Shaw On The Allegedly Useful Reduction”

Richard Holmes On Biography’s ‘Physical Pursuit’ Of Its Subjects

In an essay describing his biographical work on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Richard Holmes writes: [A] biography is…a handshake….across time, but also across cultures, across beliefs, across disciplines, across genders, and across ways of life. It is an act of friendship. It is a way of keeping the biographer’s notebook open, on both sides of thatContinue reading “Richard Holmes On Biography’s ‘Physical Pursuit’ Of Its Subjects”

Liberia, Iran, Gautemala et al.: Liberated By Coup D’Etat

In 1981 or so, as a schoolboy perusing my school library’s archives of LIFE magazine, I came upon a set of photos that–like other images in the past–showcased a brutality not immediately reconcilable with my rational understanding of the world: half-naked men, tied tight to poles with green plastic cords that bit into their skin,Continue reading “Liberia, Iran, Gautemala et al.: Liberated By Coup D’Etat”

Richard Ford On ‘Secular Redemption’

In his review of Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You: A Frank Bascombe Book (Ecco, 2014) Michael Dirda quotes Ford as saying: For me what we are charged to do as human beings is to make our lives and the lives of others liveable, as important, as charged as we possibly can. And soContinue reading “Richard Ford On ‘Secular Redemption’”

Cultural Associations Do Not Add Up

In reviewing Jonathan Lethem‘s Dissident Gardens (“Leftists in Jeopardy“, New York Review of Books, April 2014), Michael Greenberg writes: Lethem’s impulse to display his knowingness, his “vernacular” expertise, as he calls it, his belief that “were’ surrounded by signs [and] our imperative is to ignore none of them engenders a narrative noise that drowns out theContinue reading “Cultural Associations Do Not Add Up”

Freedom in the Absence of Social Convention

In reviewing Arturo Fontaine‘s La Vida Doble, “a harrowing examination of violence during the Pinochet period,” whose heroine is Lorena, “a female terrorist who is tortured, changes sides, and becomes a torturer herself”, David Gallagher writes: But why in fact do good fathers and meek husbands and generous lovers undertake such cruel torture? Here Lorena seesContinue reading “Freedom in the Absence of Social Convention”