FeaturesSay almost anything of Bruce Chatwin and the opposite is also true.” So determined his official biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, who spent eight years piecing together the endless dualities in the life of this highly secretive writer. Chatwin was both the prodigal son (read, young man in a hurry) and the wandering Jew (another classic English case of the Bolter)—a charming companion yet selfish in the extreme. An aesthete with a great gift for understanding and appreciating art, he survived financially throughout most of his life by the grubbiest of commercial dealings. A talker of epic volubility, he took up the most lonely and silent of occupations. A disciplined writer of hard-earned sentences and rhythm, he was equally capable of a senseless laziness that marred a work. He wrote three great books and followed the first two up with an impossibly poor one—the pendulum then swinging right back. A man who unquestionably loved his wife, ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 29 March 2011, on page 22 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-bolter--or-the-Chatwin-case-6981
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The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
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