Free Republic

Recently, while writing an essay on T. S. Eliot for The New York Review, I read or reread the work of many earlier critics, and was impressed most by two of them. One was Frank Kermode, who was ninety when he wrote, in 2010, one of his greatest essays, “Eliot and the Shudder,” a breathtakingly wide-ranging and sharply-focused piece about Eliot’s unique response to the common experience of shuddering. The other was a twenty-two-year-old college senior named Barack Obama, who wrote about Eliot in a letter to his girlfriend, Alexandra McNear, when she had been assigned to write a paper...

Learning From Conservative History: Main Trails . . . and Less-Traveled Paths - 01/02/09 This is part three of a symposium on contemporary conservatism hosted by ISI at Yale in November, 2008. Read part one. Read part two.By training, I am an historian. I love the discipline and believe that historical mindedness—the ability to see and understand the grounding of current institutions, issues, and events in the complex matrix of the past—this is the superior way to make sense of reality.All the same, I have been troubled for over a decade by the growing interest of American conservatives in...

this is the way the world ends,this is the way the world ends,this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. e.e. cummings