James Bowman

James Bowman on judging a classic Hollywood director by the standards of the wrong era.

James Bowman argues that the lives of 19th-century utopians were more interesting than the utopias they imagined.

James Bowman on the decisions that led to today’s heightened partisanship.

Suppose, for a moment, that you are a young person with no more knowledge of what the world was like before you were born than most young people nowadays. And suppose, further, that out of idle curiosity you took it into your head to read a really old book like, say, Edith Wharton’s The Age of…

Now it can be told: In 1968, I was one of those who got “clean for Gene.” I cut my hair and put on a jacket and tie to campaign for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic primaries of that year. Those of us who did so understood without having to have the matter explained to us that we were…

Kurt Andersen may be right in supposing that what looks like Americans’ increasing inability to distinguish fantasy from reality is the big topic of our times, and there are at least 2 or 3 of his 46 chapters in Fantasyland in which he does justice to his subject. His rapid tour d’ horizon on New…

During the British election this past year, the press reported that a certain Janek (or John) Zylinski, a Polish prince living in Britain, had taken umbrage at the anti-immigration rhetoric of Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence party, and so did what has long come naturally to Polish…

On the first page of this enjoyable double biography, Daisy Hay quotes the Mister-half of her titular couple as having said, “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” 

It’s a pity that The Speechwriter will be judged, both for good and ill, in the light of the media sensation created six years ago by Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Famous for not hiking the Appalachian Trail, Sanford is Barton Swaim’s former employer and the principal character—under the…

To judge by what is fittingly called the “head shot” of Frances Larson on the jacket of her book, she is a young and pretty woman with a remarkably long neck. If one were a headsman—that is, if headsmen were still plying their ancient trade, outside the desert wastes of Iraq and Syria and Saudi…

Let’s face it. Should Rebecca Mead, a New Yorker staff writer, offer us her mere, unadorned autobiography as something to pack along with our pail and shovel as a good beach read, she might risk the odd sarcastic comment from a friend or accusations of presumption or arrogance from those less…

The art of biography, as it is practiced today, nearly always involves the biographer as mediator between past and present, a bridge over the ever-widening gap between the two. As history has more and more become the record of what we feel we ought to be ashamed of our ancestors for, the…

If you read only one book this year to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, let me suggest Wounded rather than one of the more conventional histories. 

Much has been written about the origins and earliest years of baseball, and much, much more has been written about the period after the founding of the American League and the introduction of the rule to make foul balls strikes in 1901, from which point most people date the modern game. 

‘Modern proverbs” is surely a contradiction in terms—unless “modern” is being used in its unmodern sense of “commonplace,” as in Shakespeare’s “wise saws and modern instances.” The word “proverb” inevitably connotes the idea of age and seasoning—wisdom that has been tried by time. Indeed, a proverb…

It’s had a great five-hundred-year run .  .  . but it’s time to change.

Mary Ann Glendon begins her chapter on Rousseau by recounting the story of Napoleon’s visit to the grave of that worthy on the estate of the Marquis René Louis de Girardin at Ermenonville and saying, “It would have been better for the peace of France if this man had never lived.” When the marquis…

The Honor Code

Living in the Eighties

American Heroes

Reporting on the prospective dismissal from the Air Force of a decorated combat veteran, Lieutenant Colonel Victor Fehrenbach, because he had been identified by somebody else as gay, the Washington Post recently wrote:

Not with a Bang but a Whimper

The other day, an Irishman committed suicide. Patrick Rocca, who was described in the Times of London as "a poster boy for Ireland's Celtic tiger economy" and "seemed to embody the shiny world into which Ireland transformed itself after decades on the periphery of Europe," shot himself in the head…

The final scene of the final episode of the long-running HBO hit The Sopranos inspired thousands of fans to go to the Internet's sounding boards to complain about the choice of the series's creator, David Chase, to end it with an inconclusive blackout. For several minutes previously, he had led…

Scott of the Antarctic

THERE IS A CERTAIN KIND of young man’s novel—George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying comes to mind —that simply can’t get over the fact that men settle down, marry, have children, and get steady jobs to support them. Orwell seems to find such behavior outlandish, at once horrifying and…

The one thing American moviegoers are likely to know about the great French director Eric Rohmer, who turns eighty this month, is Gene Hackman's dismissive comment in Arthur Penn's 1975 film Night Moves. In turning down an invitation from his wife to go see My Night at Maud's, Rohmer's notoriously…

ON ONE THING ABOUT our otherwise deeply polarizing impeachment experience nearly everyone agreed: "The System worked." As Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard put it, "the impeachment drama will have yielded few heroes -- except the Constitution's Framers, whose wisdom that drama will again have…

Not long ago, when Emperor Akihito of Japan traveled to Britain for a state visit, a group of former British POWs demonstrated in protest along the route of the royal parade to Buckingham Palace. Although there are few British cows more sacred than the remaining survivors of Japanese captivity…

When the Southern Baptist Convention recently voted to censure the Disney Corporation, principally for offering health insurance coverage to the partners of gay employees, a spokeswoman for the convention explained the vote: "The Disney Company is not the same Disney that it was years ago when we…

The discussion of children's television in Washington has tended to center around a constitutional question: Does the government have the right to impose content controls on broadcasting? Broadcasters have a ready answer for this. Of course not, they say, any more than government has the right to…