That was almost a relief: this great pianist is human after all. Typically, he plays a “second concert” after the printed program is finished—a slew of encores. On Wednesday night, he played four, ...

Grace Hartigan began her art career free of the past. She had no technical training, education in art history, or particular ...

Jay Nordlinger n Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda” at the Salzburg Festival.

Viola players “don’t get no respect,” as the late Rodney Dangerfield would say. They are the butt of endless jokes (sometimes ...

George Loomis on “Les brigands,” performed by the Paris Opera.

The Salzburg Festival is staging Julius Caesar, with Emmanuelle Haïm in the pit. She leads Le Concert d’Astrée, the group she founded in 2000. The cast is an international one, loaded with ...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume opus, The Gulag Archipelago, which some have called the most important masterpiece of the twentieth century, is subtitled: “An Experiment in Literary ...

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 ...

Homer is often called the—or at least a—“father of Western civilization.” This is not a new idea. To take a prominent example, already before the end of the first century A.D., the Roman rhetorician ...

J us t 150 years ago, in 1869, Tolstoy published the final installment of War and Peace, often regarded as the greatest of all novels. In his time, Tolstoy was known as a nyetovshchik —someone who ...

Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 24, 2025, honoring Heather Mac Donald with the twelfth Edmund Burke Award for Service to ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Philosophers of language spend a lot of time debating the ins and outs of the semantics of names. I am a linguist ...