The unity inherent in the good, the beautiful, and the true inevitably brings literature into contact with issues properly political: the pursuit of the good; man’s social nature; the patterns apparent in our public life, including actions and their consequences; the moral significance of choices; the inescapability of responsibility; the wisdom and folly of [...]
Among other disasters, Neville Chamberlain is famous for a particularly ill-chosen quotation from Shakespeare. In September 1938, he announced his Munich conference with Hitler, saying, “out of this nettle danger we pluck this flower safety.” He should have read better. These words are Hotspur’s, the battle-eager rebel of Henry IV, Part 1, spoken in [...]
The late British author, Alice Thomas Ellis, is a bracing if improbable combination of Flannery O’Connor and Evelyn Waugh. Intimidated by nothing, satirically amused by most things, and weary of everything that her profound Catholic sensibilities found facile and false, Ellis wrote novels and essays that, sadly, too few now read. How fitting, then, [...]