David Cannadine dedicates his biography of Margaret Thatcher: "In memory of Mrs T." But that Mrs T is not, as one might suppose, Mrs. Thatcher, the longest-serving prime minister of Great Britain in the 20th century. Instead, the preface informs us, it is a Mrs. Thurman, the headmistress of…
David Cannadine dedicates his biography of Margaret Thatcher: “In memory of Mrs T." But that Mrs T is not, as one might suppose, Mrs. Thatcher, the longest-serving prime minister of Great Britain in the 20th century. Instead, the preface informs us, it is a Mrs. Thurman, the headmistress of…
It was by chance that my first reading of Culture and Anarchy with my students coincided with the centenary of its publication. But it was not by chance that I chose to read it then, in 1969, at the height of the culture war. Anticipating that war by more than a century, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)…
Since the Charlie Hebdo affair a year-and-a-half ago and the gratuitous, as it seemed, attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris, the condition of Jews in France has been a subject of much discussion and concern, and not only in France. An article in the London Telegraph immediately following those…
A recent book in the Yale University Press series on "Jewish Lives," a biography of the nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, opens provocatively: "Does Benjamin Disraeli deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives?" Perhaps not, a reader of the book might well…
Amy Kass’s family and friends, students and colleagues, will testify to her many virtues—her love and devotion to husband, children, and grandchildren (so amply reciprocated by them in these last painful months), her keen intellect and sensibility, her faith in Judaism as a heritage and ethic, her…
The Caitlyn (née Bruce) Jenner case has engendered if not a new subject at least a newly publicized and sensationalized one. For an old-timer like myself, transgenderism is reminiscent of the postmodernism that swept the universities several decades ago. Indeed, transgenderism now looks like a more…
This year is the centenary of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the occasion for revisiting that momentous discovery by paying tribute to one of the most famous scientists of modern times. Steven Gimbel’s brief book is a welcome contribution to that event, placing Einstein in his…
The war on terror is over, the president assured us a year ago. Now, we are told, that war is very much with us and will be pursued with all due diligence. The president was obviously responding to the polls reflecting the disapproval of the public, but also to critics in his own party. Dianne…
The debate over Obamacare may remind a student of British history of the debate in Britain over the National Insurance Act of 1911, which was in effect until the initiation of the welfare state after World War II. The protagonists in that debate (like ours, not formally a debate, but implicitly…
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law. So, too, extreme situations make bad policy and worse philosophy. The French Revolution was just such a situation; compared with the French, the English and American revolutions are almost unworthy of the title of revolution. No one took the measure of the…
George Selgin reviews The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot for the Wall Street Journal:
Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)—“the greatest Victorian,” as an eminent historian of that period memorialized him, editor of the Economist, author of The English Constitution, and a prolific essayist—is almost unknown today. (Even the pronunciation of his name is unfamiliar; it rhymes with gadget.) The…
I was at a reception at the British embassy here in Washington in the early 1990s, I believe, when I was introduced to Margaret Thatcher by John O’Sullivan, her friend and former “Special Adviser.” Gertrude Himmelfarb, he told her, had recently delivered the Margaret Thatcher Lecture in Tel Aviv on…
Defeat, like death, concentrates the mind wonderfully. It also liberates the mind. People venture to think the unthinkable, or at least, the impermissible. A new generation of conservatives may be moved to reconsider some ideas that have fallen into disuse or even disrepute. Compassion is one such…
It was perhaps inevitable that our Fourth of July celebrations last week might have seemed anti-climactic after the four-day festivities a month ago accompanying the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Fireworks, however spectacular, cannot compare with the thousand-boat flotilla on the Thames cheered on by…
In the conclusion to Coming Apart, after describing a society that is in even greater disarray (literally, coming apart) than we had supposed, Charles Murray holds out one hope for the future: “a civic Great Awakening.” Previous Great Awakenings in America had been religious. The new awakening…
Steven Amarnick reviews Gertrude Himmelfarb's The People of the Book in the Wall Street Journal:
In the last words of this book, the author quotes her brother Milton Himmelfarb in one of his last essays: “Hope is a Jewish virtue.” Nobody embodies that virtue more felicitously than Gertrude Himmelfarb, who over a long and fruitful life of scholarship has given hope to all who have encountered…
The Philosophers' Quarrel
Our First Revolution
J. Anthony Froude
A RECENT CASUAL, DISMISSIVE reference to Lionel Trilling recalled to me the man who was the most eminent intellectual figure of his time--certainly in New York intellectual circles, but also beyond that, in the country as a whole.
Not so long ago, it was TV talk shows that were being excoriated for their wanton exhibitionism as they competed for the honor of producing the most brazen or degrading revelation of the month. The award surely goes to the show (never aired but highly publicized) where one man confessed to being a…
More than half a century ago, Lionel Trilling wrote an essay on T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society, calling upon his liberal and Marxist friends to be more appreciative of a mode of "religious politics" that was familiar in Victorian times but that was now regarded as reactionary. "When…
I would think that it is not just contrariness on my part that makes me wince, these days, on hearing talk of civil society. Liberals and conservatives, communitarians and libertarians, Democrats and Republicans, academics and politicians appeal to civil society as the remedy for our dire…
Budget reform, welfare reform, Medicare reform -- this formidable combination of reforms has been proudly heralded by a new breed of conservatives as a "conservative revolution." Yet an old-fashioned conservative may find that label disquieting. Surely it is a contradiction in terms. Surely…
Race trumped gender" -- for me this comment, by a professor of government quoted in the Washington Post, is the most telling observation on the Simpson verdict.