The Side Story
January 24, 2005 · Magazine, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, Books and Arts
A Bit on the Side
Literary Scholar and Critic
Hugh OrmsbyLennon
7 articles 1999–2005
Hugh Ormsby-Lennon is a literary scholar and critic with expertise in early modern British intellectual history and literature. He contributed essays and book reviews to The Weekly Standard between 1999 and 2005, covering subjects ranging from Jonathan Swift and Thomas Hobbes to Christopher Wren and Peter Ackroyd's London. His writing reflects deep engagement with British cultural and literary history from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
And So to Bed
January 20, 2003 · Magazine, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, Books and Arts
Samuel Pepys The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin Knopf, 450 pp., $30 THERE SEEMS TO BE a consensus emerging that with "Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self," Claire Tomalin has reintroduced us to a forgotten master. "Who remembers Samuel Pepys anymore?" the New York Times Sunday book-review section…
The Dream of Mechanical Life
December 23, 2002 · Magazine, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, Books and Arts
Flesh and Machines How Robots Will Change Us by Rodney A. Brooks Parthenon, 260 pp., $26 Prey A Novel by Michael Crichton HarperCollins, 384 pp., $26.95 Dumbstruck A Cultural History of Ventriloquism by Steven Connor Oxford University Press, 448 pp., $35 Building Bots Designing and Building Warrior…
Wren's London
February 4, 2002 · Magazine, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, Books and Arts
His Invention So Fertile A Life of Christopher Wren by Adrian Tinniswood Oxford University Press, 463 pp., $35 SI monumentum requiris, circumspice. So runs the famous inscription on Christopher Wren's tomb: "If you seek his monument, look around." And what you see is the whole of St. Paul's, the…
Ackroyd's Guide to London
October 15, 2001 · Magazine, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, Books and Arts
London The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Doubleday, 864 pp., $45 TO AMERICAN TOURISTS, standing in line at the Tower or Westminster Abbey, London seems an old city, enveloped in architectural and historical atmosphere. In fact, next to nothing survives of the Romans' London--or Chaucer's, or…
Hobbes's Nature
February 19, 2001 · Magazine, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, Books and Arts
Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity
Jonathan Swift's Travels
May 24, 1999 · Magazine, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, Books and Arts
Jonathan Swift remains the most enigmatic of conservatives. He may have espoused all three of the principles by which T. S. Eliot defined his own conservatism in 1928 -- "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion" -- but Swift preferred defining himself not by…