Books
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Probably you've heard a remark attributed to Baudelaire that goes something like this: The greatest trick of the devil is to persuade men that he does not exist. I suppose the following passage from one of his prefaces to Flowers of Evil, quoted by David Yezzi in the April issue of The New Criterion, must be…
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I believe it must be somewhere close to thirty years since I first heard of this book, and thought I’d read it someday. But I didn't get around to it, and might still be not getting around to it, except that Janet Cupo recently recommended it to me, and my wife happened to have loaded…
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One of Chesterton's more well-known aphorisms holds that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. It is in that spirit that I generally approach a book review. I really don't enjoy doing them, because I feel obliged to do it in such a way as to give the prospective a reader…
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Florence is one of those girls who look on modern enlightened thought as a sort of personal buddy, and receive with an ill grace cracks at its expense. –Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning
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Which is the more wonderful name: Gussie Fink-Nottle or Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright?
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I have been trying to write something about this for more than a week now, but there's so much I could say about it that I haven't been able to get started in the brief snatches of time I've had available. So I'm going to give up and just point you elsewhere. The topic is…
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Of course you've always wanted to see W.H. Auden in a beetle costume.
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This is a follow-up to the discussion that followed on this post, and to a lesser extent on this one, about the definition of neo-conservatism and of conservatism in general. In a comment on the first one, Grumpy suggested that everyone read George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. As it happens, I…
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People who pretend to be in a Jane Austen novel.
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Here is a great post on that subject, and by that title, at All Manner of Thing. In the form of a review of two books about Dickens, including Chesterton's, it's an excellent and fascinating overview of both the man and the work. I've been meaning to link to it for a week or so.…
Light On Dark Water 