With this issue, The New Criterion begins its twentieth year of publication as a monthly review of culture and the arts. This is a significant accomplishment for any highbrow monthly; for one that has been as outspoken and heterodox as The New Criterion it is extraordinary.

The New Criterion was created partly to provide a home for vigorously written cultural criticism, partly to provide a voice of critical dissent. The two go together. At a time when culture and intellectual life are everywhere beholden to the imperatives of political correctness, even insisting on clear prose seems a daring provocation. (Thus one follower of the French decontructionist Jacques Derrida declared that “unproblematic prose” and “clarity” were “the conceptual tools of conservatism.”) Similarly, simply telling the truth about a whole host of controversial subjects is regarded as an unac ...

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