Thomas Jeffers is a literary scholar and critic who contributed book reviews and essays on literature to The Weekly Standard between 2013 and 2016. His pieces explored themes in literary history and the work of major authors, including Henry James.
‘Why did we live? Was that all? Why was I not born in Central Africa and died young. Poor Henry James thinks it all real, I believe, and actually still lives in that dreamy, stuffy Newport and Cambridge, with papa James and Charles Norton—and me! Yet, why!" Thus, writing to a friend, Henry Adams…
Readers of a certain age will remember the critical surprise—a mingling of delight and disgust—when, in 1987, a pair of books on our country and our culture, written by obscure university professors, sold like Tom Clancy. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural…
"I can be pretty handy in a roughhouse.” So said F. R. Leavis, all five-foot-six, 125 pounds of him, when offering to support some of his arty students at Downing College, Cambridge, whose protest meeting during the Suez Crisis of 1956 was threatened by members of the Boat Club. We may have trouble…
Plato is smarter than you. That’s how an experienced teacher once began a series of lectures on the Greek philosopher. And a good beginning it was, for it put students on notice that, as they read, their first duty was to attend and learn. Plato didn’t have the final word—there would be Aristotle,…