Peter Lopatin is a writer and essayist who contributed reviews and cultural commentary to The Weekly Standard between 2010 and 2016. His pieces for the magazine spanned topics in literature, history, and ideas, often taking the form of book reviews and reflective essays.
You swipe your bank card to pay for your groceries and watch the screen for the expected prompts. But in the ensuing interval, before you are able to complete your transaction, you are presented with a series of advertisements. Or you check in to your hotel and notice that the key card you are…
Simon Schama’s choice of “Story” in place of “History” in the title of this impressive new work is fitting, for the history he recounts is not history conceived of as a chronicle of important events, but rather as a compendium of thematically linked stories told throughout the ages by, and about,…
When we bemoan some bureaucratic atrocity—and the paperwork in which it so often finds tangible expression—we are likely to do so with world-weary, unreflective resignation. A well-known passage from Edna St. Vincent Millay comes to mind: So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of…
Although the definition of Romanticism has been much debated, it is not an exaggeration to claim that the generations spanning the period from the mid-18th through the mid-19th centuries were witness to a transformation in the literary, artistic, and intellectual life of Europe so radical as to be…
The Hemlock Cup Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes Knopf, 528 pp., $35
White Egrets