Imposing Order on Grief
Rob Henderson's 'Troubled' is a disjointed book, but provides valuable testimony to the importance of a stable childhood.
Iona Italia
· 23 min read
Art and Culture
A collection of 716 posts
A History of Stunts
Ryan Gosling’s new film is a love letter to an under-appreciated art.
Allan Stratton
· 9 min read
Analyst or Moralist?
The increasingly political nature of cultural criticism does a disservice to the arts, to artists, and to criticism itself.
James Jackson
· 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
· 24 min read
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
· 18 min read
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
· 12 min read
How French Intellectuals Ruined the West
Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained.
Helen Pluckrose
· 18 min read
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
· 25 min read
Disorder in Heaven
The end of greatness in heavyweight combat sports.
Alexander Blum
· 7 min read
The Wendat World
In the nineteenth instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how Indigenous societies greeted the French influx of the early seventeenth century.
Greg Koabel
· 23 min read
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
· 7 min read
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
· 36 min read
Desire and Ambition
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
· 11 min read
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
· 33 min read
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
· 9 min read