The New Criterion
America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life
- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
FeaturesNovember 2004 The lessons of On the lessons of suffering we can learn from Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. The social significance of an idea is not necessarily proportional to its truth, its coherence, or even its comprehensibility. In his introduction to a new edition of Warrant for Genocide, which is the history of the concoction of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a clumsy forgery that even now has a certain political resonance for the susceptible and weak-minded in an important region of the globe, Norman Cohn writes: It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. Nor, of course, is all writing concerned with communicating ideas, at least in any sense that an intellectu ... 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 23 November 2004, on page 17 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-lessons-of--1147
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
On Mrs. Woolf & the Servants: An Intimate History of Bloomsbury by Alison Light. A review of Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class by Ronald W. Dworkin Christopher, for better & for worse On the critic, polemicist & raconteur Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011).
Webcasts
Anthony Daniels on the Euro Crisis
Andrew C. McCarthy: The Muslim Threat
Roger Kimball: The Grim Future of Statism Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}