Donald Lyons was a cultural critic and essayist who contributed to The Weekly Standard during its early years, from 1995 to 1998. His pieces for the magazine focused on literary criticism, theater, and cultural commentary, engaging with figures such as Henry James and Rebecca West. He was also known as a film and theater critic who wrote for various publications.
The notion that new means of expression -- the printing press, the novel, the cinema, radio, television, the Internet -- have in themselves the power to derange human behavior and undo morals is an old one.
Henry James spent his life avoiding sex and contriving in his fictions strategies of reluctance and shyness in its regard. But the age of Daisy Miller has yielded to that of Diana Spencer, and the Jamesian repressed has returned with a vengeance. A recent biography of James, Henry James: The Young…
She was the Katharine Hepburn of letters, an outrageously dogmatic and stylish egoist who earned her arrogance by sheer intelligence, a flaming feminist who could be very hard on the male character and yet loved men and was loved by them. Her beauty was in her language -- and very mannered it could…
On a recent Charlie Rose program, New York Times columnist Abe Rosenthal's anxieties about the aggressive expansionism of China were " balanced" by a young Asian woman, Alice Young, who denounced such fears as imperialist and expressed doubt that China was even worth worrying about. Don't forget…
Back in 1955, New Republic drama critic Eric Bentley was actually able to write these words: "I was praised recently for having intimated that thre was too much homosexuality "in current plays, but what I meant to imply was that there was not enough. Having gone so far, our playwrights will have to…