New Criterion

Two years ago, Betsey Fox-Genovese, a prize-winning historian and recipient of a National Humanities Medal (from the administration of George W. Bush) played to a packed house at Hamilton College. One of my colleagues, one of Betsey's former students,...

In December the new "rock musical" Spring Awakening opened on Broadway after a downtown run at the Atlantic Theater, and became the only show of the season to satisfy both jaded critics and large audiences in search of a bona fide hit. The hype has...

"His perfect sense of the other" We had thought that by this time we would be immune to being surprised by The New York Times Book Review. We have often had occasion to criticize that mighty organ of literary celebrity, as much for what it neglects...

In his essay on the function of the critical quarterly, Allen Tate was moved to remark, "The great magazines have been edited by autocrats." Among so many editors and their fiefdoms--Harriet Shaw Weaver's The Egoist, Ford Madox Ford's Transatlantic...

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, originally delivered as the "Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion" at the University of Edinburgh just over a century ago--and published, to great acclaim, in 1902--William James distinguished two types of...

After checking the obituaries section of The Times of London for war heroes, explorers and outdoorsmen, people I know, writers and journalists, academics and schoolteachers--for The Times, like other British papers, quite often does run non-paid obituaries...