Reading of pandemics past.

Samuel Johnson, first among equals.

The callow genius of Percy Bysse Shelley.

Francis Parkman’s politically incorrect history.

Misery loves company.

What Joseph Conrad knew.

The first Protestant.

Frank Lloyd Wright at 150.

Navigating Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Thomas Alva Edison and the American way of life.

Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The passion and dispassion of Jacob Burckhardt.

Why we haven't outgrown Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Allan Bloom and the state of the American mind.

Even "the crystal spirit" had his The surest sign that a writer has made his mark is the adoption of his surname in common parlance as an adjective immediately significant even to those who barely know his work, or merely know of it.

Remembering the Great War after 100 years

Truth and eternal harmonies.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was in his own day, and remains on the bicentennial of his birth, the operatic composer most important to philosophers, literary men, honest-to-goodness intellectuals, and the usual assortment of those impressed above al

Appalling ideas set to beautiful music.

W.H. Prescott's grand account of the bloody Spanish Empire.

In literature and in public life, Mark Helprin’s is an indispensable voice.

Each unhappy genius is unhappy in his own way.

Reading the Iliad in English.

He was a conservative liberal and a liberal conservative.

Novelist David Foster Wallace shows how to recover one’s soul.

A review of Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America's Gilded Age, by Mosette Broderick

A review of H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series (Library of America), by H.L. Mencken, edited by Marion Rogers

Harvey C. Mansfield discusses Henry James's "Washington Square".

Once again, the contrast between Churchill and Bloomsbury matters.

Reviewing the memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon, courtier at Louis XIV's Versailles.

Edmund Wilson remains the finest critic American literature has produced; we can only hope for a better.

The life of Leni Riefenstahl, the Third Reich's great documentary filmmaker.

Western travelers in the Muslim world.

The mental keenness and literary grace of George Santayana.

How Beethoven harmonized democracy and genius.