Review of D. J. Taylor’s Who Is Big Brother? by Theodore Dalrymple.
New at IWP Books: Aldous Huxley, 1930, Music at Night. From the Essay on Foreheads Villainous Low:“If by some miracle the dreams of the educationists were realized and the majority of human beings began to take an exclusive interest in the things of the mind, the whole industrial system would instantly collapse. Given modern machinery, there can be no industrial prosperity without mass production. Mass production is impossible without mass consumption. Other things being equal, consumption varies inversely with the intensity of mental life. A man who is exclusively interested in the things of the m… waisberg.micro.blog
New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Shaw, 1951. From Jacques Barzun’s review of the book:“Desmond MacCarthy has not in this country the reputation that he deserves. A few know him as the one-time editor of a periodical of the Thirties called Life and Letters, as the author of a book on the much earlier but no less significant Court Theatre, and as a critic at large for the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. He is also to be numbered among the band of learned lunatics (I profess to be one too) who take pleasure in the pseudo-scholarship of Sherlock Holmes. The reissue in book form of Mr. MacCarthy… waisberg.micro.blog
New at IWP Books, Two by Bernard Shaw: On the Rocks (1934) and Geneva (1938). Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence:“In his last years, Shaw extolled Russian Communism, like Bertrand Russell, the Webbs, and millions of other intellectuals. But in Shaw, one suspects a different spirit within the motive. His approval of government by murder and massacre looks like a desperate gambler’s last throw. It contradicts not only a lifetime of clear pragmatic thought, since protracted violence means practical failure, but also the plays written at the same time as the advocacy: The Apple Cart, On the Rocks, … waisberg.micro.blog
New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Experience, 1935. Three Parts: Of Human Nature; During the War; Digressions of a Reviewer. From the Chapter on Making Speeches:“What daunts me when I get upon my feet to speak is not that I am unaccustomed to public speaking, but that all my previous speeches have been failures. And yet I think, or rather, to use the formula of words which was constantly on the lips of that cautious metaphysician Sir William Hamilton, — “It seems to me that I think I believe,” that there is the making of a speaker in me. In the first place, why otherwise should I continue to be … waisberg.micro.blog
Mary Murphy is one of Nine-to-Five
Tonight: Stories from the Stage
Sleepless night (in Israel), some of the time working on: Desmond MacCarthy, Humanities, 1954. Now at IWP Books. Chapters on Ibsen, Chekhov, T. S. Eliot, De Quincey, Sidney Smith, Leigh Hunt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Swinburne, Edgar Allan Poe, & More. Two more books by MacCarthy to appear soon: Experience and... waisberg.micro.blog
Gary Saul Morson, “Lucky Joe” [Joseph Epstein]
Tomorrow night: Mary Murphy
Joseph Shaw, Why Do Bishops Cover Up Sexual Abuse?
New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Memories, 1953. Chapters on Lytton Strachey, Kipling, Maupassant, Leslie Stephen, Hardy, James Joyce, Landor, Siegfried Sassoon, Logan Pearsall Smith, Max Beerbohm & More.
Who are your heroes?
My Unholy Trinity has been Jesus, Galileo, and Oscar Wilde.
Which living person do you most admire?.
Among my personal friends, Jacques Barzun. Among the more distant, Nelson Mandela.
Which living person do you most despise?.
I try not to despise anyone, and I usually succeed. Contempt is bad for the soul.
—Eric Bentley, “A Proust Questionnaire”
From John Jay Chapman, Letters and Religion
New at IWP Books: John Jay Chapman, 1924, Letters and Religion. From the Book:On Horace
“It is easier to imagine a substitute for telegraphy than a substitute for Horace’s Odes; for the contrivances that harness electrical power change rapidly — a new one replaces an old. But the vehicles which carry spiritual power around the world are so subtle and complex, so much a part of the human mind’s own history, that they speak to every generation in its home tongue, and live down a hundred theories of scientific truth and ten thousand contrivances of material convenience.”
“I cite Horace as a symbol, … waisberg.micro.blog
New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Criticism, 1932. Chapters on Samuel Butler, George Santayana, Boswell, Literary Booms, Literary Snobs, James Joyce, Proust, Defoe, Aldous Huxley, and More. From the Chapter “A Critic’s Day Book”:“I still read for pleasure — that is a statement which would strike most people as hardly worth making. Yet I could assure them that if it caught the eye of a fellow-reviewer he would drop this book in astonishment. Very likely on second thoughts he wouldn’t believe it. Several most capable reviewers have, I happen to know, almost entirely lost the faculty of reading. Th… waisberg.micro.blog