Art and Culture - Quillette

Analyst or Moralist?

The increasingly political nature of cultural criticism does a disservice to the arts, to artists, and to criticism itself.

James Jackson

15 May 2024 · 11 min read

Less Than Half ‘A Man in Full’

One of US television’s most experienced and talented writers has made a mess of Tom Wolfe’s second novel.

Kevin Mims

13 May 2024 · 23 min read

The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains: artwork showing two groups of horseman with lances in combat.

Showdown in Champagne

In the tenth instalment of ‘The So-Called Dark Ages,’ Herbert Bushman describes the epic 451 C.E. battle that pitted Attila the Hun against Gaul’s Roman and Gothic defenders.

Herbert Bushman

10 May 2024 · 17 min read

A young boy builds a church out of toy bricks. Artwork by Megan Gafford.

The Religious Instinct in a Godless World

The religious urge is born into nearly every child. And when we do not inherit a belief system, we build our own temples.

Megan Gafford

9 May 2024 · 12 min read

Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida

How French Intellectuals Ruined the West

Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained.

Helen Pluckrose

7 May 2024 · 17 min read

The Chandos portrait, likely Shakespeare, early 17th century

The Paranoid Style in Shakespeare Denialism

Against conspiracist trends, there is an obligation on defenders of a liberal society to uphold the integrity of its intellectual methods.

Oliver Kamm

2 May 2024 · 25 min read

Francis Ngannou knocks down Tyson Fury during the Heavyweight fight

Disorder in Heaven

The end of greatness in heavyweight combat sports.

Alexander Blum

30 Apr 2024 · 6 min read

A Wendat group from Wendake, in modern Quebec, photographed in 1880.

The Wendat World

In the 19th instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how Indigenous societies greeted the French influx of the early seventeenth century.

Greg Koabel

29 Apr 2024 · 22 min read

Actor Nick Offerman as the President of the US during a public address. A still from the film.

American Carnage

Alex Garland’s spectacular new film ‘Civil War’ is a warning of what can happen to democracies when civil society collapses.

Allan Stratton

18 Apr 2024 · 6 min read

A still of Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Leaud in Le Chinoise. They are sitting at a table reading and smoking cigarettes.

Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part II: Fanaticism and Failure (1966–2022)

After half a decade of critical adulation, Godard’s career slumped into doctrinaire Maoism, bitterness, incomprehensibility, and irrelevance. It never recovered.

Charlotte Allen

16 Apr 2024 · 36 min read

A still of John Braine speaking Black and white image, portrait, John in glasses.

Today, most of John Braine’s work is out of print and forgotten. But he was an underrated writer, unafraid to confront the complexities of masculine sexuality with terse precision, self-deprecation, and emotional candour.

Brad Strotten

13 Apr 2024 · 10 min read

A woman and two men, snapping their fingers. Image from Band à Part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)

Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part I: Abstraction Hero (1930–65)

A brief five-year period produced nearly all the Godard movies that film aficionados still remember, but even these celebrated works have dated poorly.

Charlotte Allen

10 Apr 2024 · 33 min read

John Belushi as John “Bluto” Blutarsky in Animal House (John Landis, 1978)

The Delta Variant

John Landis’s 1978 comedy classic ‘Animal House’ is a time capsule from an era when humor and campus politics were very different.

George Case

8 Apr 2024 · 9 min read

Feast of Attila, by Hungarian painter Mór Than (1828–99).

Under Attila’s Gaze

In the ninth instalment of ‘The So-Called Dark Ages,’ Herbert Bushman describes a Roman diplomat’s famous fifth-century journey into the heart of Hunnic territory.