There has never been a good time to be an honest writer in Communist China, but the present is an exceptionally bad time. Spooked by the "Arab Spring" and jostling for position in next year's scheduled leadership changes, the Party bosses have been coming down hard on every kind of independent thinking. The cases of... Read More

How does this conservative look forward to a new Tom Wolfe novel? Let me count the ways. • The political incorrectness. Well, not exactly that. Tom Wolfe takes no point of view, has no bill of goods to sell. He just calmly, coolly records the way things are, the way people look and talk, the... Read More

History. Britain in Revolution by Austin Woolrych. This only came out in November, and then only in Britain, but I jumped on Amazon-U.K. and ordered a copy right away, and am now reading it with great pleasure. Woolrych, who is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Lancaster, in the north of England, and... Read More

I hasten to say that this is not the first French novel I have read. There was a period of my life when I read little else but French novels. (In translation, let me add. Having mastered the label on the HP Sauce bottle in childhood, I found that the desire to read texts in... Read More

The Time Machine Directed by Simon Wells, Gore Verbinski Starring Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba Screenplay by John Logan Dreamworks Studios Science fiction comes in two varieties: pure and applied. The purpose of pure science fiction is, in the words of the late Kingsley Amis, "to arouse wonder, terror and excitement." The purpose of applied science... Read More

On Tuesday night I went to the opera to see Norma. What follows here is not exactly a review. I know my place, and I leave serious musical commentary to my colleague Jay Nordlinger, who does it superbly well (see almost any issue of The New Criterion). This is more in the nature of what... Read More