From Victor Navasky’s NYT review of two books by or about William F. Buckley (thanks to Scott Lahti for an early link to the piece):
It is probably no accident, as the old-left journals used to say, that both Buckley and Carey McWilliams, The Nation’s longtime editor, were fans of Albert Jay Nock, who after briefly [...]
Here’s the LA Times obit. My favorite Heston movie? Toss-up between “The Omega Man” and “Soylent Green.” I’d give the latter a slight edge.
I met William F. Buckley Jr. on just a couple of occasions. He gave a talk at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis back around 2000 — one of his last campus talks. He had some spare time in his schedule, including time for a chat with my conservative group at Washington University (which is [...]
I was saddened to hear of the death on Monday of E. Victor Milione. He was president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute for a quarter of a century, from 1963 to 1988; indeed, it would not be wrong to say that he built the organization. He had been one of the first scholarly young men [...]
I bought Alan Pell Crawford’s new book, Twilight at Monticello, on Friday (along with Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right). I’m looking forward both to reading it and, I hope, reviewing it somewhere. But you don’t have to wait for my review: you can get two opinions of the book from Bill Kauffman, [...]
Sound advice from Clive James, who reveals a new reason to like Pablo Neruda:
Pablo Neruda was instrumental in smoothing the assassin’s path [to planting an ice ax in Trotsky's melon] but never wrote a poem on the subject: something to remember when reading the thousands of ecstatic love poems he did write. They are full [...]
The pro-life and antiwar Democratic Senator who was George McGovern’s running mate until word of his psychiatric treatment — including electroconvulsive therapy — died Sunday at age 77. We could use a few Democrats (or heck, Republicans for that matter) more like him. He once co-wrote a book called War and Presdiential Power: A Chronicle [...]
One of the great minds of 20th century American conservatism died on Friday. From the LA Times obit:
Peter R. Viereck, a historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and political philosopher who was spurned by the modern conservative movement despite his central role in its birth, died May 13 at his home in South Hadley, Mass., after [...]
John Profumo, former British secretary of war and center of a sex-and-spies scandal in the early ’60s, has died. He was cut from a cloth very different from that of today’s politicians, as the New York Times obit remarks:
…after his fall, he withdrew permanently from public office, refused to discuss the scandal that ruined [...]