Tag: literature

Tolkien’s True Love

The values of Tolkien’s world are not those of moral relativism, but those of the traditional Christian conception of courtship and romantic loyalty, in which the intimate aspects of love are treated with discretion and respect that protects their nobility.

French Bill To End ‘Woke’ Rewrites

MP Thiériot, who proposed the bill, believes that decisions to rewrite were made because of “pressure from the ‘wokist’ movement and ‘cancel culture.’”

Whereby Hangs the Tale, Marcel Proust?

It’s obvious Proust knew a great deal about art and architecture and music; he was a keen observer of human behavior, but he can take a moment and turn it into an eternity.

Radical Sympathies

Henry James praised Ivan Turgenev because, though the man possessed a pessimistic streak, in his novels he painted tender pictures that bled sympathy for all.

FORGOTTEN CLASSICS:
Sir Gawain and the Christmas Night

Sir Gawain is a dramatic tale of a knight’s bravery and chastity in the face of temptation and, crucially, the distinctive experience of grace and forgiveness that Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection has made possible.

Culture and Politics on a ‘Fortress Island’

A people do not become a nation—however tiny and insignificant a nation—until they possess a literature; just as a man becomes a man only when he reveals his personality through speech.

Escaping the Tyranny of Relevance

Intellectual adventure is not available to bees, who simply do as they do in obedience to their limited nature. The hive may be a place of cohesion, but it contains no libraries, paintings, or statues to heroic bees of the past. Human life without the humanities would be much the same: cut off from our roots, deprived of meditation, and locked in an eternal now. The cult of relevance makes prisoners of us all.

 Rediscovering Waugh

There is far more to Waugh than first meets the eye, and no matter how great the gulf between his era and ours, readers who delve into his work can discover not only a supremely gifted literary craftsman, but an extraordinary soul and intellect as well.