Every culture has a literature that is to some extent subterranean. Much of it deserves to stay there. But certain pieces occasionally bubble to the surface. Invariably this happens because the work ...

Each week the editors of The New Criterion offer recommendations on what to read, see, and hear in the world of culture in the weekly Critic’s Notebook. To get it first, subscribe to the free Critic’s ...

None dare say “battle of the bands.” Apologies: I just did. Three weeks ago, the New York Philharmonic, under Gustavo Dudamel, played Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in David Geffen Hall. Last night, the ...

Jane Coombs on New York City Ballet’s annual Fall Fashion Gala.

On Georgia O’Keeffe, ancient magic, John Russell Pope, unrequited love & more from the world of culture.

Watch Andrew Roberts deliver the Seventh Annual Circle Lecture, “Will China bury us?” A version of the remarks appear in the November 2024 issue of The New Criterion.

Thomas Sowell is one of the towering American intellectuals of our time. An economist trained at the University of Chicago and a social theorist of the first rank, he has been a senior fellow at the ...

War. If the modern age is a revenge on those naive commentators who thought war could be banished by law, humanitarianism, or technology controlled by a superpower, then its frequency and apparently ...

It was improbable, to say the least, that the David Gruen born as a Jew in 1886 in the back-of-beyond Polish-Russian township of Plonsk should have become David Ben-Gurion, a world-historical figure.

Christopher Hitchens loved life, his great friend Martin Amis once observed. And Amis himself? “I like life.” It was a typical Amis line: expertly grasping a cliché and turning its pockets inside out.

Renoir puzzles me. I’ve never understood why so perceptive a critic as Julius Meier-Graefe, usually an acute judge of originality and excellence, thought Renoir was second only to Corot and believed ...