In the early 1980s, when compiling for Penguin Books The Portable Conservative Reader, Russell Kirk included a short story by a British archaeologist, Jacquetta Hawkes. It was from her collection, Fables, published in 1953 in London and also in New York the same year, although under the title A Woman as Great as the World and [...]
Certain phrases meant to be dismissive make no sense. For example, “comfort food,” a far from complimentary reference to food beneath the notice of people who apparently prefer food that makes them uncomfortable. It simply leaves more bacon and Guy Kibbee eggs for the rest of us. Another example is “calendar art,” a smug judgment handed [...]
T. S. Eliot’s humor best comes across in his poems about cats, but some of his plays have lines meant to amuse. In The Elder Statesman (1959), a retired politician is being shown around the care home he has just entered. “And remember,” says his guide, “when you want to be very quiet/There’s the Silence Room. [...]
Thirty years ago premiered on television in Britain and the United States Shadowlands, a drama about C. S. Lewis and his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham. It starred Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom, and it surpasses the 1993 theatrical film version, in which Anthony Hopkins as Lewis essentially reprised his role of Stevens, the butler in 1993’s [...]
A sub-genre of the short story is the club tale, a story told by a man in a gentleman’s club, usually in London. For example, a collection of short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Views the Body (1928), begins with one in which Lord Peter Wimsey and his valet, Bunter, take a corpse to [...]
Heraldry of Humility and Pride A characteristic form of Christian art is heraldry. As G. K. Chesterton noted in The Everlasting Man (1925), ancient Egyptians “had a sort of heraldry; that is, decorative art used for symbolic and social purposes.” Nevertheless, their kind of heraldry is no longer with us. No one writing to a genealogical [...]
In a letter dated 14 June, 1958, Flannery O’Connor wrote about a man who had committed suicide, “His tragedy was I suppose that he didn’t know what to do with his suffering.” For many, O’Connor (1925-1964) is the Mozart of American fiction; acclaimed in her brief life, her writings have merited a volume in the handsome [...]
An exhibit at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art of seventeen etchings and paintings by Edward Hopper (1882-1967) evokes a lost world, yet people recognize in Hopper’s work a timeless quality. Hopper’s quiet, lonely scenes, usually described as melancholy, make one feel one has been there: one has been in that now empty room where the afternoon [...]
Fifty years ago one of the world’s most revered men died. Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) once held the same moral role as did Mother Teresa in our day, and both Schweitzer and Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize, she in 1979, he in 1953. Just as everyone today still recognizes the image of the seemingly frail [...]
Recent events bring to mind some questions, and maybe our readers can offer some answers. For example, regarding protests about income inequality: What would income equality look like? We know what a society with unequal incomes looks like; it has existed in every land for millennia. Would a society of income equality resemble the Distributist dream [...]