In selecting books to read, many people are content to employ The Random Walk method of my childhood, when I was set loose, without guidance, in a library to prowl on my own. This method has the advantage of finding hidden treasures, but it’s a bit like digging for gold, without any knowledge of what gold is and where it can be found, in a vacant lot. You’re more likely to find old soup cans, dog excrement, and sodden rotting copies of the shopper insert in the daily newspaper.
Thomas Campion was a great song-writer of the 16th and 17th centuries. Now winter nights enlarge The number of their hours; And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine, Let well-turned words amaze With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights Sleep’s leaden spells remove. This time doth well dispense With lovers’ long discourse; Much speech hath some defense, Though beauty no remorse. All do not all things well; Some measures comely tread, Some knotted riddles tell, Some...
I pledge to my supporters that I shall do what I can to restore the vision of political order that inspired the drafters of the Constitution.
The press have been beating down my door and besieging me by telephone and email to find out my positions. My crack team of specialists and eggheads is preparing a package of proposals that I intend, as every good candidate does, to ignore.
I am not sensing a great deal of interest in this great novel, but I shall raise one question to see if it receives a response. If readers have got at least a fourth of the way through the work, they will have read the account of Pan Jan’s diplomatic journey, his capture, and his trials.
This talk was given early last year at the Immaculata Classical Academy in Louisville.
There are countless books and articles on the press: its history, its role in defining democracy, its problems, its scandals. What is hard to find is a serious discussion of the fundamental dishonesty, the trivial huckstering that characterizes even the best newspapers. I once had dinner with a distinguished European scholar, who, with a little encouragement, asked me why there was so little freedom of discussion in the United States. Was it due to the village mentality described by Tocqueville? Or was it merely the effect of the tight grip of the media oligarchy? If the latter was true, how...
My campaign manager Red Phillips, recovering from a COVID infection that sent him recently into the ICU, arose from his bed of suffering to create our first poster
Why is the Father in heaven–or rather in the heavens–and what and where are they? Listeners are advised to cut off the podcast before the castrato sings at the end.
