The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

October 2004 Volume 23, Number 2  

Notes & Comments

No Lapham matter
by Roger Kimball
On Lewis H. Lapham’s recent article titled “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill”; a fantasy of disturbing proportions.


Features

Gulliver’s travails: The U.S. in the post-Cold-War world
by John O'Sullivan
On U. S. foreign policy in the post-Cold-War world.

Assoluta
by Laura Jacobs
Who will be the next assoluta in the ballet world?

The real Che
by Anthony Daniels
On the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara; irrational reflection “kept alive by a good dose of commercialism.”

In search of Don Quixote
by Martin Greenberg
On two “schools” of reading “the mother of all novels.”


Poems

Entasis
by Lisa Barnett

The North Wind's daughter
by Sarah Ruden

On my refusal to attend a poet's protest against the war
by Sarah Skwire


Features

The self-made Scot
by John Keegan
On John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps; “a writer touched by genius.”


Theater

Gitmo chic
by Mark Steyn
On Nicolas Kent and Sacha Wares’s New York production of Guantanamo & William Gibson’s Golda’s Balcony at the Helen Hayes.


Art

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero
On “Scott LoBaido” at Tribute Gallery; Will Cotton at Mary Boone Chelsea Gallery; “Modern Masters” at Salander-O’Reilly; “Lois Dodd: Flashings” at Alexandre Gallery; Joan Mitchell at Mary Ryan Gallery; “Under the Influence” at Barbara Mathes Gallery & Ai Weiwei at Robert Miller Gallery.


Music

Salzburg chronicle
by Jay Nordlinger
On this year's Salzburg Festival, including the Czech Philharmonic and Chorus conducted by Gerd Albrecht, a recital by singer Violeta Urmana, and Korngold's opera Die tote Stadt.


The Media

Rhetorical recklessness
by James Bowman
On “the absence of any shame in self-contradiction among our journalistic and political controversialists today”


Books

The insider's insider
by John Russell
A review of Duveen: A Life in Art, by Meryle Secrest.

Theory of everything
by Martin Gardner
A review of The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, by Roger Penrose.

The usual suspects
by David Pryce-Jones
A review of Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess, by S. J. Hamrick & The Private Life of Kim Philby, by Rufina Philby.

Rock rage
by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
A review of A Rage for Rock Gardening: The story of Reginald Farrer, by Nicola Shulman.

The world's first story
by John J. Miller
A review of Gilgamesh, translated by Derrek Hines & Gilgamesh: A New English Version, translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Shorter notices
by Roger Kimball
Roger Kimball on The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, 1952-1973, edited by John Saumarez Smith.

Shorter notices
by Stefan Beck
Stefan Beck on In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman.


Notebook

The "Memory" of Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004
by Hilton Kramer
On the passing of Czeslaw Milosz, “a writer of multiple achievements but also a prophet of liberation for whom the individual exercise of disabused memory came to constitute a spiritual vocation.”