In 1970, in a review of Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, John Russell, art critic of the New York Times, grandly prophesied that "the civilization that Clark describes is one which has had its day and will not be seen again." In acknowledging the learned brio with which Clark came to the defense of…
In The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), his study of English culture in the 18th century, John Brewer made a vital point when he argued that, although we might look back on the culture of the Georgians and see an enviable “order, stability and decorum," the Georgians themselves considered it…
"Democracy has not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of our public men," the Liberal prime minister William Gladstone told his biographer, John Morley, towards the end of his life. And he had no doubt that "For all this deterioration one man and one man only is responsible: Disraeli.…
No history cries out for revision more insistently than Irish history. And no event in Irish history demonstrates this better than the Easter Rebellion—the centennial of which is now in full throttle—because no event better epitomizes the vexed question of what constitutes Irish identity and Irish…
"At the beginning of the 21st century," Edward Mendelson writes in his entry on W. H. Auden in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "many readers thought it not implausible to judge his work the greatest body of poetry in English of the previous hundred years or more." Even allowing for a…
In 1908, H. L. Mencken was approached by an editor and author named Robert Rives La Monte, who was keen on persuading the 28-year-old Mencken to join him in an epistolary debate about the benefits of socialism: La Monte would argue for and Mencken could argue against. Despite his misgivings,…
Writing in 1920 of Algernon Swinburne, the appeal of whose enraptured lyricism was not self-evident to the generation that had survived the Great War, T. S. Eliot pronounced, in that marvelously authoritative tone of his, that "it is a question of some nicety to decide how much must be read of any…
In his memorable poem “At the Grave of Henry James,” W. H. Auden apostrophized the novelist to make a useful point:
During 1849-50, the author and journalist Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) set about anatomizing the lives of the London poor in a series of 82 articles for the Morning Chronicle, which would eventually lay the groundwork for the greatest study of the English poor ever written, the four-volume London…
In the debate about what needs to be done to make university education more coherent and more effective, no figure is cited more frequently than John Henry Newman, whose classic study The Idea of a University (1873) tackles educational questions that still exercise would-be reformers. Some of those…
In 1732, Jonathan Swift wrote a friend that, while he had lost all hope of favor with those in power in Dublin, he had won “the love of the Irish vulgar” and inspired “two or three dozen signposts of the Drapier in this city.” Here, he was referring to Dublin’s gratitude for the eloquent stand he…
In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Pitt Crawley, Becky Sharp’s first employer, “an old, stumpy, short, vulgar, and very dirty man, in old clothes and shabby old gaiters, who smokes a horrid pipe, and cooks his own horrid supper in a saucepan,” is given a characteristic by his…
This deft, revelatory collection opens with a poem about the poet’s mother, in which Richard Greene speaks of shapes of memory from which she can / never turn away. Integral to his own “shapes of memory” is familial love, and Greene, who has written a brilliant critical biography of Edith Sitwell…
In this foray into what Hamlet famously styled the “undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” Judy Bachrach looks at recent accounts of those claiming to have returned from the undiscovered country in order to suggest what her readers’—and, indeed, her own—“impending itineraries”…
In his preface to this well-researched and witty retelling of the famous Ampthill Succession case, Bevis Hillier recalls how he chose his subject after researching a proposed Oxford Book of Fleet Street. He went to a dealer of vintage newspapers in Covent Garden and came away with a sheaf of old…
In 1871, when Albert Edward Prince of Wales (1841-1910) and his wife Alexandra lost their youngest child after a premature birth, Queen Victoria advised that they go into prolonged mourning. Bertie’s response exhibited one of the great differences between him and his notoriously woeful mother:
In 1755, in the preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson declared that “the chief glory of every people arises from its authors.” Barely 160 years later, when England entered the First World War, the very notion of glory began to take a beating from which it has never…
England produced some superb letter-writers in the 19th century: Lord Byron, Emily Eden, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, and Sydney Smith gave an altogether new charm and expressiveness to the epistolary art. Smith’s letter to his young friend Miss Lucie Austin in 1835 is a good example:
In his groundbreaking history of the American War of Independence from the British standpoint, The War for America (1964), Piers Mackesy argued, “To understand the war, one must view it with sympathy for the Ministers in their difficulties, and not with the arrogant assumption that because they…
If one thing distinguishes all of Conrad Black’s books, from his brilliant biographies of Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon to his impassioned 2011 apologia, A Matter of Principle, it is exuberance. The onetime press magnate takes up nothing that he does not enliven, and by offering readers a…
When John Henry Newman died in 1890, English papers around the world singled out different aspects of his life and work for praise or censure, but on one point they were unanimous. As the obituarist of the Colonies and India put it, “We question whether there is a living writer who had a command of…
When John Betjeman was charged with helping find a proper recipient for the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1977, he contacted Philip Larkin and suggested Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), who had befriended Larkin and Kingsley Amis when they were undergraduates together at Oxford. Larkin considered…
Not long ago I was in Boston browsing the stacks of that legendary emporium, the Brattle Book Shop, when I chanced upon Winston Spencer Churchill: Servant of Crown and Commonwealth, a collection of tributes to the parliamentarian, war leader, historian, and wit, which his longstanding English…
Does a biography bring any psychological insight to the portrayal of its subject? Does it place its subject in the context of his or her contemporaries? Does it have anything of critical substance to say about its subject? Is it well written? Is it entertaining? Is it animated by that sympathetic…
The popular Victorian novelist and travel writer Georgiana, Lady Chatterton (1806-1876), describing the bafflement she felt when reading the Bible as a girl, recalled how “one governess considered me unteachable, because I could not say the second Psalm by heart, and especially the verse, ‘Why do…
On the cover of Ian Donaldson’s new biography of Ben Jonson (1572-1637) there is a portrait of the poet and dramatist by the Flemish painter Abraham van Blyenberch showing him regarding the viewer with amused intentness, as if poised to make some choice rejoinder. Here is the man of the theater,…
In 1909 Henry James took thousands of letters that he had received over the years into his garden at Lamb House in Rye and committed them to a great bonfire. In his last years what time he could spare from refining his ever more rarefied fiction he devoted to confounding his biographers. Indeed, he…
n 1853, when William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) made his first lecture tour of America, Boston particularly pleased him because, as he said, its “vast amount of toryism and donnishness” reminded him of Edinburgh. Today, there may be precious little toryism or donnishness left in Boston, but…
In 1747, eight years before the publication of his pioneering dictionary, Samuel Johnson wrote that his “chief intent” in compiling his great work was “to preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of the English idiom,” which he characterized as “the exact and pure idea of a grammatical…
In The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson famously claimed that he wrote his history to rescue his subjects “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” This did not stop him from saddling his weavers, tailors, croppers, and artisans with aspirations that they would hardly have…
G. K. Chesterton A Biography by Ian Ker Oxford, 688 pp., $66
History Man
The Oxford Companion to the Book edited by Michael Suarez & H. R. Woudhuysen Oxford, 1,408 pp., $325
Dead End Gene Pool
Modernizing
Augustine of Hippo
Renaissance Faces
Samuel Johnson
Lived in London
God's Architect
The White War
Collected Critical Writings
The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations
The Lights That Failed
The National Gallery in Wartime
Blood Sport
Luck and the Irish
Coincidentally
The House That George Built
Cheating at Canasta
Fathers and Sons
Absent Minds
John Osborne
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
T.S. Eliot
The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman
Jacques & Raissa Maritain
The Oxford Book of American Poetry
Divided by a Common Language
The Mind of Gladstone
Why Study the Past?