New Criterion

It is possible that there are uglier towns in the world than Walsall, but if so I do not know them: and I consider myself better than averagely traveled. But while Walsall undoubtedly exists, it is difficult to know where precisely it begins and ends,...

No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave. --Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward Looking...

"Man has created death," Yeats wrote, and his last collection of poems with its stark title represents the poet's increasingly baffled attempt not only to create his own death but also to stage-manage his memorial from beyond the tomb. The effort demanded...

For some, he merely wrote the score of The Godfather. For the slightly more knowledgeable, he composed all the best Fellini scores. For the still better informed, he also provided many other directors with scores, and was one of our finest film composers....

Every time I walked through the splendid Chardin exhibition at the Metropolitan(1) this summer, I was struck by how impossible it was to imagine how this eighteenth-century master's paintings looked to his contemporaries. Not that there's a lack of...