The New Criterion
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FeaturesApril 2003 Who was Simon Raven? by Brooke Allen Considering the late English novelist, journalist, television writer & cult figure. Novelists who achieve a cult status write, by definition, for a narrow and usually specialist readership, and while their books are not for everyone, they attract certain passionate partisans. One cult figure, the English novelist, journalist, and television writer Simon Raven (1927–2001), did not reach a mass audience or even attain a very broad readership among the upper middle class and the intelligentsia; but then, he never exerted himself very far to do so. “I’ve always written for a small audience consisting of people like myself,” he remarked, “who are well-educated, worldly, skeptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad). And who believe that nothing and nobody is special.” “People like myself”: there are few of them left, for Raven was one of a breed that was dying in his youth and is now all but extinct. Not that ... 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 21 April 2003, on page 9 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/simonraven-allen-1756
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by Brooke Allen On the life and legacy of August Strindberg, the Swedish artist whose variety is under-appreciated. 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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