Some Monday Readings - April 27, 2026

The Hunger for the Real – Christine Rosen at Commentary. 

Who is Blake Whiting? – Andrew Lawler at The American Scholar on the most productive historian in publishing.

 

The Secret of Shakespeare’s London House – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Review: The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War by Huw J. Davies – Ben Powers at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Agatha Christie & the metaphysics of murder – Theodore Dalrymple at The New Criterion.

 

The right-wing case for social media – Alex Yates at The Critic Magazine.

 

Create a System for Consistency – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

The American Way is Under Fire – The Editors at The Free Press.

Photograph: Agatha Christie at work.

Some Monday Readings

The Wonder of The Comedy: How to Read Dante – Jason Baxter at The Imaginative Conservative. 

A Shakespearean History of Traffic – Callan Davies at The Shakespeare Stage.

 

The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities – Tyler Austin Harper at The Atlantic.

 

Don’t Count Your Chickens – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

Updike without a paddle – Bruce Bawer at New Criterion on Selected Letters of John Updike.

 

Ten Odd Facts About Hanel’s “Messiah” – Terez Rose at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Illustration: Dante holding a copy of The Divine Comedy at the entrance of hell, with the terraces of Purgatory and the spheres of heaven. Fresco by Domenico di Michelino (1465).

Saturday Good Reads - April 26, 2025

Something strange is afoot – Gen Z is flocking to church. It’ not only happening in the United States (where the return appears to be led by young men) but also in Britain, where it’s being called “a very British revival.” 

The outcome of the American Revolution was a very near thing, and there were many times when all looked lost and the British would regain control. But things happened; in some cases, they were very small things. Sam Negus at Law & Liberty looks at the “Contingency in the American Revolution.”

 

For centuries, scholars have believed that William Shakespeare abandoned his family in Stratford while he went to seek fame and fortune in London. New evidence suggests that this isn’t really what happened, and that Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway had a much stronger and better marriage that previously believed. 

 

Faith

 

Bid Adieu. Machen was right – Nathan Eshelman at Gentle Reformation.

 

Amid the chaos and the night of man: From The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

What We Miss When We Skip the Prophets – Ryan Higginbottom at Knowable Word.

News Media

 

A new media order is emerging: Journalism isn’t dead. It’s on Substack – Hamish McKenzie at The Substack Pot.

 

Poetry

 

“The Listeners,” poem by Walter de la Mare – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

John Neihardt’s Epic ‘Cycle of the West’: Uncovering America’s Forgotten Poet, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 – Andrew Benson Brown at Classical Poets Live.

 

A Widower – Amit Majmudar at Literary Matters.

 

Veils – Tyler Rogness at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“Channel Firing,” poem by Thomas Hardy – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“Re-reading Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories,” poem by Douglas Dunn – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

American Stuff

 

Don Sickles Returns to Gettysburg for the Last Time – John L. Hopkins at Emerging Civil War.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Art of Adventure Covers – Frank Theodat at Pulp, Pipe, & Poetry.

 

America 250

 

Stolen or Gone Missing? – Journal of the American Revolution.

 

Paul Revere Wasn’t the Only Midnight Rider Who Dashed in the Darkness to Warn the Patriots That the British Were Coming – Ellen Wexler at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

Community Life

 

Garden with Children – Reid Makowsky at Front Porch Republic.

 

Culture

 

Princeton’s War on Civil Rights – Christopher Rufo.

 

Desert Road – Casting Crowns

Painting: Man with Moustache Reading, oil on canvas (1930s) by Louise Alix (1888-1980). 

Some Wednesday Readings

“Battle of Jackson” Day – Chris Mackowski at Emerging Cicil War.

 

The end of “Anglo-Saxon”? – Samuel Rubinstein at The Critic Magazine. 

 

Things I Learned from Rural Living – Lara D’Entremont at Story Warren.

 

Climate Protestors Charged over Magna Carta Attack in London – Gareth Harris at The Art Newspaper.

 

Non-profits Are Making Billions Off the Border Crisis – Madeleine Rowley at The Free Press.

 

Guardians of the Nation’s Glory: The Civil War Memorials of Northwest Washington, D.C. – Kyle Hallowell at Emerging Civil War. 

 

Reading Shakespeare at Home with Teenagers – Joseph Woodard at The Imaginative Conservative.

Photograph: The Magna Carta, via Wikimedia. 

Some Thursday Readings

Words, words, words: On the Bard’s 400-hundred-year legacy – Amit Majmudar at New Criterion. 

Memory – poem by G.K. Chesterton at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

That crayon – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher. 

 

“Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

When Life Betrays You, Only Love Remains – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book review on The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.

 

Afghan Terror’s Return – Jeffrey Gedmin at American Purpose.

 

Rogue Prosecutors and the Rise of Crime – Cully Stimson at Imprimis / Hillsdale College.

 

Redcar Collector, a Dark Teeside short story by Glenn McGoldrick, is free today on Amazon.

 

Painting: The Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare, circa 1600-1610, attributed to John Taylor. 

"The Banished Heart" by Libi Astaire

Paul Hoffman is preparing to defend his doctoral thesis on William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. He’s been navigating his literature department with varying degrees of success and failure. Everything has become political, and even a 400-year-old play can be suspect. His advisor is in one political camp, the department head in another.  

Political violence erupts the day he is to make his defense; in fact, it happens just as his defense begins. Paul is verbally attacked by the department head and severely beaten by radical students. During a period of unconsciousness, Paul has a dream, in which he’s offered a choice. Stand for truth to make a difference, or die.

 

A story begins. It is a story of a young William Shakespeare, a boy in Stratford-on-Avon. He befriends another boy, whose family is ostensibly Christian and Anglican but are secretly Jewish. According to English law at the time, all Jews are banished from the kingdom. And it is the boy’s grandfather who begins to teach his grandson the Torah in secret. Young Shakespeare finagles his way into the studies, thing the Hebrew words and letters are a secret code.

 

From there, the story moves to Shakespeare’s London. The young boy is now a playwright of growing fame, one who’s caught the eye of Queen Elizabeth. Political events almost mandate that theater companies produce a play about an evil Jew. Shakespeare, remembering his childhood friend, is loath to do it. Eventually, he writes a play that makes the lead Jewish character seem human. It scandalizes the theater owner and Shakespeare’s patron. 

 

Libi Astaire

What does this have to do with Paul Hoffman’s decision? Paul is living in 1933 Berlin. Hitler has just been elected, and Nazi violence, like the famous book burning, is on the upswing. During his thesis defense, Paul, who is Jewish, is attacked by faculty and students espousing Hitler’s cause. And he faces a decision.

 

The Banished Heart by Libi Astaire is the story of Paul in early Nazi Germany and William Shakespeare in a London hostile to Jews. It’s an almost hypnotic tale of anti-Semitism, mob violence, and personal courage. That Astaire combines the two historical periods in one story suggests that she clearly sees parallels.

 

Astaire has also published the Jewish Regency Mystery series, the novel Terra Incognita, a set of the retelling of Chasidic tales entitled Choose Light!, Day Trips to Jewish History: Essays, and The Latke in the Library & Other Mystery Stories for Chanukah. 

 

The Banished Heart is a moving story of hatred, violence, mobs, and the courage required to swim against the stream. And it holds many lessons for our own time. 

“The Tragedy of the Republic” by Pierre Manent

Wiseblood Books has been publishing a series of lengthy essays about contemporary culture. These include Duty, the Soul of Beauty: Henry James on the Beautiful Life by R.R. Reno; How to Think Like a Poet by Ryan Wilson; Poetry as Enchantment and The Catholic Writer Today by Dana Gioia; The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking by James Matthew Wilson; and several others. 

A recent publication is The Tragedy of the Republic by Pierre Manent, with an introduction by Patrick Deneen. The essay, originally a lecture at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, considers a question about republics. Do the constituents of republics elect leaders to represent their interests, or do they elect leaders to represent the common good.?

 

Manent answers the question by examining two plays of Shakespeare, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, with a special focus on the speeches and actions of three characters – Coriolanus, Brutus, and Cassius. 

 

Shakespeare borrowed the story of Coriolanus from Plutarch’s Lives, as he did for several of plays. Plutarch described him as a Roman general who was successful in quashing several rebellions against the Roman government, sought political office, was believed to be overreaching, and was exiled. He joins with one of Rome’s enemies and is eventually killed. Many historians doubt his existence. 

 

Pierre Manent

In Julius Caesar, (and in historical fact), Brutus and Cassius were key players in the successful assassination of Caesar. They were allies in the conspiracy, but their motivations were entirely different, as presented by Plutarch and Shakespeare. Brutus sought to remove what he saw as a dire threat to the republic; Cassius was a bit more self-interested but needed the cover of Brutus’s noble reputation.

 

Manent is professor emeritus of political philosophy at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sciences Sociales. His nurmous published works include Toqueville and the Nature of Democracy, The City of Man, and A World Beyond Politics?, among many others. He is known for being a classic liberal and a Euroskeptic. 

 

The Tragedy of the Republic seems an especially apt discussion in the current American political environment. But Manent, perhaps unintentionally, also demonstrates something else, and that is the value of the traditional Western canon of literature in creating an understanding of vital contemporary events. 

"How to Think Like Shakespeare" by Scott Newstok

In the mid-1990s, when email was all the rage and the worldwide web was making its commercial appearance, a friend in IT who was something of an IT guru told me about the DIKW pyramid, sometimes called the DIKW hierarchy. He explained how data becomes information, information becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes wisdom. 

I confess I didn’t take this too seriously. Even this early in the IT revolution, I was already skeptical about the heaven on earth promised by proponents of information technology. I was less concerned about how data leads to wisdom and more concerned with how the technology could be used and how it was likely to change everything, for good and for bad. Twenty-five years later, if the hierarchy was accurate, then we should be drowning in wisdom, which we clearly are not. We may have more data, more information, and more knowledge, but somehow wisdom decoupled from the train, assuming it was there in the first place.

 

I was reminded of my quarter-century-old conversation while reading the excellent How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education by Scott Newstok.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Shakespeare (via Ian Doescher) Does Star Wars

In July of 1977, my wife and I took a break from moving into a new house in Houston and made our way to the local movie theater. It was the opening day for Star Wars, and we went to the early afternoon showing. Except for us, the theater was almost empty. We loved the movie. When we left the theater, we discovered where all the people were – the line was more than two blocks long.

It was our introduction to the Star Wars franchise, now more than 40 years old. We ended up skipping the three prequels, but we returned for the three with Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, including the most recent release, The Last Jedi.

We saw the George Lucas (and later Disney) productions. We didn’t know about the Shakespeare versions. I wonder how the Globe Theatre managed the battle fleets and the Death Star back in the early 1600s. And the light sabers.

You didn’t know about the Shakespeare versions?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Literary Tour: Samuel Johnson’s House, London

leave London’s Circle Line underground train (aka The Tube) at Temple Station, adjacent to The Temple, the legal center of London with two of the four Inns of Court, Middle Temple, Inner Temple, and Temple Church. It’s raining, and I fortunately brought my umbrella. From the tube station, I walk what are essentially back alleys and narrow delivery streets, passing not a few pubs, some older than the United States. Think Pomeroy’s Bar in Rumpole of the Bailey, the pub which provided Rumpole with his “Chateau Thames Embankment” white wine.

When I reach Fleet Street, which becomes the Strand going west and Cannon Street going east, the setting becomes even more Rumpole-like. The front windows of several clothing shops feature the black gowns and white wigs worn by attorneys in court; one is even advertising a special price for the entire ensemble for only 599 pounds (at the time, about US $1,000).

I walk east, and can’t help but notice the huge edifice of St. Paul’s Cathedral dominating the skyline. My destination will stop a few blocks short of St. Paul’s. I’m looking for 167 Fleet, which is the closest address to a meandering alleyway. A small sign at the alley’s entrance contains the words I’m looking for: “The Samuel Johnson House.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: The Samuel Johnson House, Gough Square, London.