John Simon

John Simon introduces the great director to a new generation on his centennial.

A revisionist account of the great wit’s post-prison life.

Julian Barnes has written important novels, from Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) to The Sense of an Ending (2011), as well as much nonfiction. Some of it has been great; some of it, inevitably, a bit less so. But all of it is the product of a subtle, searching, incisive, and witty mind, always riveting…

A good many books are interesting, but far fewer are charming. That, however, is what Wear and Tear is. Tracy Tynan is the only child of the celebrated British drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the wittiest 20th-century critic in any genre, and his American wife Elaine Dundy, author of the novel The Dud…

A good many books are interesting, but far fewer are charming. That, however, is what Wear and Tear is. Tracy Tynan is the only child of the celebrated British drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the wittiest 20th-century critic in any genre, and his American wife Elaine Dundy, author of the novel The Dud…

Charles Simic and I both grew up in Belgrade—then Yugoslavia and now Serbia—he later and harder than I. Immigrating, he has become a notable American poet and prosaist, winning numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. He has published 20 volumes of poetry and several…

Tolstoy’s famous dictum—the second half of it, anyway—that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” certainly applies to the O’Neills, in spades. Though our concern here is with the playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), the miseries of his father, James, his mother, Mary (known as Ella),…

Let me say, remotely alluding to Robert Frost, that something there is that loves a puzzle. Any kind of puzzle, as long as it makes the solver feel good. His conquest cannot compare with Genghis Khan’s or Napoleon’s, but conquest there is, and the glow of satisfaction.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was a man of multiple talents: He was a composer of classical music as well as of musical comedies (On the Town, Wonderful Town, Candide, West Side Story) and a number of ballets for choreographer Jerome Robbins. He was composer, too, of the epochal film score for On…

Drama critics come in all kinds, besides, of course, good and bad. There are those who regurgitate the plot and those who gallop off on hobby-horses. There are those with sound ideas but no style; those with impressive styles but no taste. Some tergiversate, even without a Janus face; others ride…

Let’s start with a kind of syllogism. Philosophers write books of philosophy. Emrys Westacott teaches philosophy at Alfred University. Therefore his book, The Virtues of Our Vices, is a book of philosophy. And so, worse luck, it is.

The Tiger’s Wife A Novel by Téa Obreht Random House, 352 pp., $25

Selected Prose Works

The Noël Coward Reader

Contested Will

A Windfall of Musicians

The Triumph of Music

Lately I have been rereading some of the poems of Archibald MacLeish. I can't say that I like them any more than I ever did, but it brings back memories of the time when I was a section man at Harvard in a poetry course he taught.

Desert Island Discs is a long-running favorite program of BBC radio, on which guests name the eight recordings that would help sustain them on a desert island. Responding to an invitation by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, I choose to omit operas because there I wouldn't know where to begin. For other music,…

The Modern Element

The Canon

Classics for Pleasure

Philip Larkin

My 1972 book, Ingmar Bergman Directs, begins with a long interview. After that, the first sentence runs: "Ingmar Bergman is, in my most carefully considered opinion, the greatest filmmaker the world has seen so far." Thirty-five years later, upon news of Bergman's death last month, that is still my…

Notebooks

Millennial Stages

A Concise History

Beckett Remembering/ Remembering Beckett

Federico Fellini

IT IS TRAGIC HOW MANY dead American composers are buried again through neglect by American orchestras (which is not to say that most living ones fare that much better).

IT IS THE FIRST WORK of literature ever written down, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and it's a masterpiece. Ironically, it stems from that cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, which has gone by many names but is now Iraq. Where once the civilizing art of letters sprung up, there now is war and…

IT IS INSTRUCTIVE TO COMPARE concurrent productions of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. This was the first of Wilde's four social comedies that climaxed in his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. The two productions are at Washington's Shakespeare Theatre and at the Williamstown…

THE TONY AWARDS, ALAS, are becoming less tony by the year. Meant to celebrate (however questionably) the best in Broadway theater, they are resorting to ever more desperate stratagems to, as they believe, tailor their TV show to higher ratings, i.e., peddle it to what used to be called the great…