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Not being very well-read, I am not much of a literary critic. Like everyone else, though, I have my literary enthusiasms, and occasionally get the opportunity to express them in print.
Some of the pieces here are rough surveys of writers whose works have impressed me in some way, or of some broad field of literature. Others were published as book reviews, the book under review usually being a literary biography. There are a couple of movies in there, too.
A fair definition of these pieces would be: "Articles based on a book, a movie, or a writer that attempt to go deeper than a journeyman review." Since these pieces don't really rise to the level of academic lit. crit., I have called them "Considerations."
Date | Place | Title | Considered |
---|---|---|---|
September 2016 | The New Criterion | The Goulash Archipelago | Miklós Bánffy's Transylvanian Trilogy |
October 2011 | The New Criterion | Alexandria, Durrell & the "Quartet" | The Alexandria Quartet |
Fall 2010 | Claremont Review of Books | Meeting the Goose | Arthur Koestler |
June 12, 2010 | The Wall Street Journal | Five Best | Five books of, for, or by curmudgeons. |
May 10, 2010 | Taki's Magazine | The Voice of the WASP | James Gould Cozzens |
Summer 2009 | Claremont Review of Books | Rudyard's Adventures in Wonderland |
Kipling again |
November 17, 2008 | National Review | The Emperor of Common Sense | Samuel Johnson |
October 2008 | The New Criterion | Hazlitt's Philocaption | William Hazlitt |
April 26, 2007 | NRO | Dancin', Yeah | Saturday Night Fever |
March 5, 2007 | National Review | Huxley's Period Piece | Brave New World |
September 2006 | The New Criterion | Divine Love, Divine Order | Charles Kingsley |
August 30, 2006 | NRO | A Triumphant Misfit | John Betjeman |
May 15, 2006 | National Review Online | February Fooled the Forsythia | Lolita |
April 19, 2006 | National Review Online | Sculpting with Dust | Samuel Beckett |
Spring 2006 | The New Atlantis | Father of Science Fiction? | Jules Verne |
February 2005 | The New Criterion | Alfred Duggan's Past | Alfred Duggan |
December 22, 2004 | The New York Sun | What To Make of George Crabbe | George Crabbe |
July 28, 2004 | NRO | Oh, the Songs! | Cole Porter |
Summer 2004 | Claremont Review of Books | On a Green Knoll Apart | W.B. Yeats |
February 2003 | The New Criterion | What Happened to Aldous Huxley? | Aldous Huxley |
February 15, 2002 | NRO | The Kindly Race of Men | Sinclair Lewis |
March 2001 | The New Criterion | The Life and the Life | James Boswell |
February 2001 | Parnassus: Poetry in Review | All the Way to Chang Feng Sha | Medieval Chinese poetry and its translations. |
December 2000 | The New Criterion | In the Bivouac of Life | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. |
March 2000 | The New Criterion | Rudyard Kipling and the God of Things As They Are |
Rudyard Kipling |
February 18, 2000 | National Post (Canada) | A Writer of Craft | Patrick O'Brian |
September 1999 | The New Criterion | Sub specie aeternitatis. | J.F. Powers |
August 30, 1999 | National Review | Swift Kicks | Jonathan Swift |
September 14, 1998 | National Review | A Writer All Through | Kingsley Amis |