New Criterion

The works that produce the most traceable effects in the subsequent history of an art are not always those which come to be regarded as epoch-making. --Donald Francis Tovey Perhaps the most productive midlife crisis in the history of music began...

Michigan's thin line Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. -- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four We have often had occasion to dilate on the Orwellian nature...

Throughout William Makepeace Thackeray's professional life, he was plagued by explicit and implied comparisons with his great contemporary, Charles Dickens. Thackeray was born in 1811, Dickens a year later. By the mid-1830s, when the callow young Thackeray...

The election gods will have their little jokes won't they? Last month we noticed the irony of brainy Al Gore's desperate appeal on behalf of a putative army of disenfranchised Morons for Gore in Palm Beach County, Florida, for a second chance to register...