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Harold Bloom, a giant of literary criticism, died in New York yesterday at the age of 89. The author of dozens of books and editor of hundreds more, Bloom taught at Yale University for five decades, beguiling his students and angering his critics who accused him of racism and sexism for his eurocentric views.Bloom got into trouble for his unabashed praise of Western literary giants like Shakespeare, Kafka, and Chaucer. And, he was unapologetic about it.NPR: Bloom had a photographic memory, and claimed he could recite all of Shakespeare, all of John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and copious swaths of...

Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who championed and defended the Western canon in an outpouring of influential books that appeared not only on college syllabuses but also — unusual for an academic — on best-seller lists, died on Monday at a hospital in New Haven. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanne Bloom, who said he taught his last class at Yale University on Thursday.

An Egyptian billionaire financier who feared for his life after being accused of being a Mossad spy was found dead outside his Mayfair flat yesterday in suspicious circumstances. Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of the late President Gamel Abdel Nasser, was found beneath his fourth-floor flat in Carlton House Terrace. Police were treating his death as suspicious. Friends of Mr Marwan, a former shareholder in Chelsea Football Club, said that he had feared assassination after being named three years ago as an agent during the Yom Kippur war. Rumours of his death circulated in London’s Arab community last night. Some believe...

...I saw my first Harold Bloom interview last night on the Charlie Rose show (I just noticed the horticultural imagery of Bloom and Rose...) Anyway - he was pluggiing his new book, something about Yahweh and Jesus. Well he started out sounding very scholarly and well-studied, then without batting a nancy-boy eyelash he swerved into tin-foil hat, anti-GWB and anit-evangelical rants. In my opinion, Charlie Rose looked very uncomfortable and squirmed in his chair as he tired to politely pull his guest back to reality (Bloom must have had a double wrap, tin-foil cap on becuase he wasn't picking up...

Contempt for religion costs Democrats more than votes 8 One day in January I was meeting with a longtime friend, a smart and experienced publisher, and we were talking about the recent election and the inauguration. My friend was shaking his head, as many Americans have been doing since election day, wondering why so many people voted for Bush when it did not seem to be in their economic interest to do so. I said that I thought I understood, and that it was Harold Bloom’s engaging, provocative, sometimes wacky book The American Religion, among other things, that had helped...

Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce. In the past two decades, this nation has lived through the spectacle of Anita Hill accusing Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; the destruction of the career of Sen. Bob Packwood; the ugly drama of Paula Jones, her lawyers and the president; and, as a result, the creation of multiple university and workplace "codes of sexual conduct," which no one dares defy. But...

And now a word from The Observer culture reporter. Naomi Wolf is back in the news. Nearly two decades after graduating from Yale, Ms. Wolf is taking on her alma mater and the patriarchy, in the form of eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom. According to sources at New York magazine and Yale University, in the course of reporting an article slated to run in next week’s issue, Ms. Wolf has been claiming that Mr. Bloom sexually harassed her while she was an undergraduate 20 years ago. Mr. Bloom didn’t agree to be interviewed for the New York magazine story, and...

<p>Lincoln, confronting the South's rebellion, first established our imperial presidency. Since then we have become increasingly a plutocracy. Like such precursors as Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Warren Harding, the current possessor of the White House sincerely believes in making the rich richer, while expressing the hope that somehow all of his constituents must eventually benefit from this benign process. Our nation has long invested in this hope, with our territorial expansion (mostly at the expense of Mexico, and of the Native Americans) and also overseas extensions fueling the investment. At this time, we occupy all of Iraq, and rather less of Afghanistan. These irrealistic adventures, while expensive in money and in blood, are more venturesome than most of our past incursions, but otherwise not radically new. What is different are the provocations. Fundamentalist Islam conducts a world-wide terror onslaught, much of it financed by Saudi Arabia. Israel and the Arabs continue to fight a Hundred Years War, going back to the earliest Zionist emigrants, and we are now well along in the first decade of a religious war that could endure for another century. All this is piously denied by nearly everyone, yet all the deniers know better. The American Empire, like the Roman before it, seeks to impose a Roman peace upon the world.</p>

<p>The American Empire needs a general in the White House.</p> <p>Lincoln, confronting the South's rebellion, first established our imperial presidency. Since then we have become increasingly a plutocracy. Like such precursors as Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Warren Harding, the current possessor of the White House sincerely believes in making the rich richer, while expressing the hope that somehow all of his constituents must eventually benefit from this benign process. Our nation has long invested in this hope, with our territorial expansion (mostly at the expense of Mexico, and of the Native Americans) and also overseas extensions fueling the investment. At this time, we occupy all of Iraq, and rather less of Afghanistan. These irrealistic adventures, while expensive in money and in blood, are more venturesome than most of our past incursions, but otherwise not radically new. What is different are the provocations. Fundamentalist Islam conducts a world-wide terror onslaught, much of it financed by Saudi Arabia. Israel and the Arabs continue to fight a Hundred Years War, going back to the earliest Zionist emigrants, and we are now well along in the first decade of a religious war that could endure for another century. All this is piously denied by nearly everyone, yet all the deniers know better. The American Empire, like the Roman before it, seeks to impose a Roman peace upon the world.</p>

A professor at Yale for nearly five decades and the author of more than twenty books, Harold Bloom is one of the world's best-known literary critics. He has also amassed one of the world's greatest personal libraries. The NEW YORK TIMES says that his "collection of some 25,000 volumes encompasses most of American and British poetry, criticism, and literary history, some with his handwritten notes in the margins. There are rare first editions," as well as great artworks and personal letters from famous writers. But the seventy-two-year-old professor has shocked the academic community by deciding to give all of this...