“I was asked to write a five-minute orchestra work expressing the current world situation and to do it as soon as possible.” That is an interesting, possibly daunting, assignment. What was “the ...

On Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers, by David Suisman.

On Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, by Rhodri Lewis.

Sabin Howard has been at the center of a battle over sculpture for over three decades. I first wrote about him in this space nearly twenty years ago, when I paid a visit to his studio in the South ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series.

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series.

While we are accustomed to thinking of the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) as an essentially cheerful figure, a man whose scenes are imbued with a refulgent Mediterranean light, ...

and all from mane to hoof clear-cut, cast against the broad side of a barn. This shape loomed before I saw the horse standing below, golden—yet trivial.

Poor Max Boot. By his own telling, he began working on his ambitious, now newly published biography of Ronald Reagan in 2013, when he was still a Reagan-admiring neoconservative in good standing. 1 ...

Although both correspondents in this selection of letters were authors, their identities and professional purviews were markedly distinct. Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016) was a first-rate Australian ...

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) spent her financially distressed final decade enthralled by the life of King Herod and working on a novel about him. The books of the 1930s and ’40s that made her ...

Although I have been writing for publication for more than forty years, it always pleases (and surprises) me when someone writes to tell me that he or she has read something that I have written. It is ...