Europe
What’s Eating David Axelrod?
The Road to Mastery
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong By Terry Teachout (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 475 pp., $30) Duke Ellington’s America By Harvey G. Cohen (University of Chicago Press, 688 pp., $40) Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original By Robin D.G. Kelley (Free Press, 588 pp., $30) READ MORE >>
The Velvet Surrender
The Fortunate Journey
The Escorial: Art and Power in the Renaissance By Henry Kamen (Yale University Press, 291 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
Obama vs. the Republicans (With Full Speech Text)
I think it's safe to say that President Obama has given up on bipartisanship, at least for the foreseeable future. READ MORE >>
You Say Recession, I Say Depression
The terms “recession” and “depression” were once used to suggest that a downturn was not as bad as a “panic” or “crisis.” In fact, for the first years of his presidency, Herbert Hoover chose to refer to the downturn as a “depression” in an effort to convey that what the country was experiencing was just a temporary indentation. Only in 1931 did Hoover begin to speak of a “Great Depression.” READ MORE >>
The New York Times Laments "A Sadly Wary Misunderstanding of Muslim-Americans." But Really Is It "Sadly Wary" Or A "Misunderstanding" At All?
UPDATE: I have written an apology for one sentence written below. READ MORE >>
The Warrior-Humanist
For more on Bernard Knox, please read an extraordinary report of his heroism in World War II and a collection of his best pieces for TNR. READ MORE >>
Bernard Knox's TNR Classics
"Years of Iron"; August 27, 1990. Knox reviews a new translation of Ovid's poetry, along with a novel depicting a fictional search for the poet. "The Oldest Dead White European Males"; May 25, 1992. A consideration of the ancient Greeks, who "invented the idea and gave us the name of Europe," but also formed a "society in which, for all practical purposes...women played no part whatsoever." READ MORE >>
I Like Turkey, but It's Not Going to Join the European Union
For a brief season, Henry Hopkinson was a Tory politician of the second rank, who might have risen higher if he hadn’t famously misspoken in 1954. As a junior minister at the Colonial Office, he said in the House of Commons that Cyprus would never be granted independence. This dogged him for the rest of his life. “Never say never,” Churchill supposedly said, and Hopkinson was dropped from the government not long afterwards, quite soon departing for the House of Lords under the disguise of Lord Colyton, just before, as it happened, Cyprus became independent. READ MORE >>
