Weekly recommendations from the Editors on what to read, see, and hear in the world of culture.

Anatoly Grablevsky on “Monet and Venice,” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Gentz called the American Revolution “defensive” and the French one “offensive.” Maistre traced the latter’s most offensive ...

When war broke out again in Europe on September 1, 1939, the Depression-era U.S. Army was only some 170,000 soldiers ...

Paul du Quenoy on the season-opening new production of Lohengrin at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.

William Walton composed his “What Cheer?” in 1961. But that carol hearkens back to an earlier form, and its words date to, ...

Editors’ note: To buy this and other classic New Criterion essays in stand-alone print format, see the reprint series in our bookstore. Since it is difficult, or rather impossible, to represent a ...

[T]he whig historian can draw lines through certain events, . . . and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents ...

Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The New Criterion’s seventh annual Circle Lecture on September 18, 2025. On November 18, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the first ...

Lust strives to become intellectualized, the concrete operations of the flesh are blended with decorous abstractions, human loves tend toward the impossibilities of angelic embraces. Magic and ...

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 ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Despite all that, Zamyatin was lucky. Other writers who (to quote from the same letter) earned a “criminal name” ...