The novel treats Britain’s past with the utmost respect it deserves; the regency world is presented to the reader in all its glory. Susanna Clarke does not betray its spirit by infusing it with modern culture, unlike so many other representations of the period.
Tobias Kratzer successfully framed the tale’s tension between the temptation of lustful vice and the promise of salvation as a modern ‘crise de conscience.’
Hypersensitivity forces beauty into a politically-correct straitjacket. It is hardly surprising that such straitjackets kill beauty, for what cannot breathe, cannot live.
Oriental Jews may well have been discriminated against throughout Israel’s early decades, but Michale Boganim’s latest documentary vastly exaggerates their current plight.
If the Church as we know it is to survive, it must change course immediately. I have no doubt that in any future attempt to salvage what is left of it, Kwasniewski’s analyses will be invaluable.
The 2-hour documentary “Pandamned”by Dutch filmmaker Marijn Poels is a colossal undertaking aiming to summarize and assess overall socio-political developments of the past few years.
Lewis wants his readers to re-examine our presumptions about everything from modern education and science to ‘the West’ and contraception. Recognizing this can help us understand why the novel has so divided readers.
It is hard to imagine a more complex piece than Korngold’s Violin Concerto. It stands on the cusp of classical music’s transformation from an art form confined to the concert hall, into a multimedia concept.
While I agree with the aims and even admire the methods of the protesters of 2019 to 2020, it is likely that when China does assume full control of the Hong Kong territory, they will have made things worse.
Whereas much science fiction simply sidesteps the theological questions a Christian would raise on discovering rational life on other planets, C.S. Lewis asks us to wrestle with them.
American composer Michael Dellaira secured the operatic rights to Lampedusa’s novel after rereading it following a trip to Sicily in 2014. Pandemic complications froze the entire performance world for two years, so the opera only had its world premiere in March 2022, in a run of two performances by the Frost Opera Theater.
Judging by the 1942 film, the story of Bambi is a relatively simple and childish tale. True, it famously deals with Bambi’s loss of his mother, but in general the movie leaves viewers with the banal, sentimental, fuzzy feelings that has made Disney an entertainment juggernaut. But these are not the feelings Salten’s original novel produces, nor is the novel particularly intended for children. How, then, did Disney’s image of Bambi become the predominant one? And how does this story and its reception shed light on our current Western culture?
Particularly in Britain, the New Culture Forum’s film is likely to evoke plaintive sentiments, if not downright fury. Indeed, the UK Conservative government has altogether less to show for itself than the Hungarians do after an equivalent period of now twelve years in Downing Street.
Set against the production’s dismal sets, the action unfolded as a five-hour dirge of funereal hopelessness before ejecting spectators into equally gray Manhattan surroundings where after-theater conviviality is long dead.
Listening to Renée Fleming in an intimate recital nearly five years after her semi-retirement, one has to wonder if she left too soon. She has upcoming April concerts in France, Germany, Lithuania, and the UK.
Norse mythology, unlike the Sacred Scriptures, does not present readers with loving and merciful divinities. The Norse gods are violent boozers, many of whom seem to spend most of their time playing practical jokes and fighting giants. And yet there is a great power to the tales.
Sadly, Macbeth turned out to be more of a miss than a hit. Livermore replaced the original Scottish setting of Verdi’s opera and Shakespeare’s play with a modern urban gangster war. The idea is far from original. Theater directors have toyed with it for at least forty years, not only with Macbeth but with other operas featuring political power tainted by betrayal and a hint of sexuality.
How do localism and nationalism fit together? How do each of these philosophical approaches to place use and abuse the innate noble feeling of patriotism? Over the course of Chesterton’s story, we are challenged to confront these questions and answer how we ought to live.
Interested readers should know that, in what is billed as “the return of one of the greatest pianists of our time” spanning from Beethoven’s “Appassionata” and Chopin’s “Third Sonata,” Yefim Bronfman will perform a piano recital at the Teatro Auditorium Manzoni in Bologna on February 28, 2022.
The novel is compelling (even spellbinding at times)—and if it is called antiquated, it is only because we have forgotten that the oldest human battle is the worthiest one: the battle to achieve and maintain virtue in a fallen world.
Paradoxically, too much sympathy makes us selfish—obsessed with our feelings and how others stimulate these. Meanwhile, in this novel, “nature” stands for the inevitability of limits, borders, hierarchies that will put sympathy in its place and make age-old laws respected.
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who played without a score, approached each prelude individually, but with an intensity that conveyed a highly personal understanding.
As one of the first arts companies to return to live performance as the pandemic subsided, the Palm Beach Symphony has rocketed to national importance and richly deserves international notice.
Early in his tenure, Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink had led one of the staples of the company’s ballet repertoire, MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, set to a score by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. It was therefore fitting that a recent performance of this revival was dedicated to his memory.
“The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art,” on display through February 2022 at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, combines important works from the various Morozov collections into one vast exhibition.
The reader should question Caldwell’s thesis that the U.S. ‘civil rights’ campaign in the 1960s was equivalent to opening a Pandora’s box of left-wing nonsense. But his insistence upon the decisive character of such “curtailments on freedom of association”—heavily influenced by John Stuart Mill’s harm principle—is much more problematic.
Visitors to the June-October exhibition at the Met Museum in New York were spared the longer fate of the Medicis, who in both action and art came to resemble Europe’s other royal families.
The book’s editor argues that the present era is not only unfavourable for conservatives but that we are witnessing the intentional discrediting of the classical and Christian traditions, and the deliberate cultivation of a prejudice against conservatism. Yet he does not conceal his hope that this collection should bring about a rehabilitation of conservative thinking.
Too often, human rights, both as jargon and as a type of imperial ideology, have been used as political justification for constant militarized efforts to supersede the barriers of national sovereignty.
This retelling of the Greek tragedy is a departure from the fatalism of the ancients, but it grasps the sensibilities behind the notion of fashioning one’s own moral imperatives in what came to be called existentialist thought. It is Œdipe’s resistance to the gods and to his own predestination that matters more than anything else. It is a fine message to be revived in a Europe that resembles an ever-present surveillance regime more than an ever-closer union.
It is precisely because Peterson (for the most part) advocates for a restoration of the world via the embrace of traditional human notions of courage, order, and self-control, that he is so despised by the Left, which thrives on chaos, weakness, and intemperance.
At a time when religion is routinely mocked as “anti-intellectual,” dismissed as prejudice or superstition or baseless opinion, the author of this book shows that, on the contrary, the true religion has the power of reason as well as the best minds of Western philosophy on its side.
The “fake news” of Santamarta del Pozo’s book [Fake news del Imperio español] are the age-old “tricks and hoaxes” promulgated by the enemies of Spain throughout the centuries: those who have sought to paint the country in the worst possible light. This was not done out of humanitarianism. It was done because Spain’s rivals wanted Spanish gold, political power, and colonies.
Every country that has a classical music tradition has encountered Wagner and has produced passionate and revelatory debates about how his innovations in subject and composition should be approached.
We need to return to a healthy respect for reality, reason, and truth, and once again submit our politics, our science, our desire for justice—and our pursuit of political and social goods—to reality, reason, and truth.
This book is a valuable vademecum for all European conservatives—and should be seen as a call to action for the revival of European conservative thinking in the public arena.
