The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

November 1999 Volume 18, Number 3  

Notes & Comments

Better late...
On The Decline and Fall of Literature

Alexandre Kojève, KGB spy


Features

The elephant in the gallery, or the lessons of “Sensation”
by Roger Kimball
On Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection, the Brooklyn Museum of Art

The fiasco of “The American Century”
by Hilton Kramer
On The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000, at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Jorge Luis Borges & the plural I
by Eric Ormsby

Iris Murdoch: a memoir
by Jeffrey Meyers

The life and times of Fanny Burney
by Jeremy Bernstein


Poems

Reprieve, reprise
by Elizabeth Spires

White curtain
by Elizabeth Spires

Brooklyn
by Harvey Shapiro


Theater

Lowered expectations
by Mark Steyn
On Brian Friel's Give Me Your Answer, Do! & David Crane's Epic Proportions


Art

Ingres at the Metropolitan
by Karen Wilkin


The Media

Childish wish-fulfillment
by James Bowman


Fiction Chronicle

Silence, exile, cunning
by Brooke Allen
Reviews of A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle, The Last Life by Claire Messud & Lovers for a Day: New and Collected Stories by Ivan Klima


Books

Arts of power
by Paul Dean
Review of The History of the Reign of King Henry the VII by Francis Bacon, edited by Brian Vickers

A profligate's reserve
by David Yezzi
Reviews of My Dog Tulip & My Father & Myself by J. R. Ackerley

Serious about books
by John Derbyshire
Review of The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski

Lightkeepers
by Ben Downing
Review of The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Soane's tense balance
by J. Duncan Berry
John Soane: An Accidental Romantic by Gillian Darley


Notebook

Gooseberries
by Theodore Dalrymple
Reflections on Chekhov & the author's father