"A wonderful collection of short pieces-gossipy, chatty, full of overheard conversations, unexpectedly sharp judgments, remarkable predictions. During his lifetime, Henry McBride was the best known and most widely read American art critic, and reading The Flow of Art you can see why. Never doctrinaire or solemn, he managed to write in such a way that the widest audience-artists, curators, collectors, people with a broad interest in the arts and even the general public, with its marginal interest could find something in him. . . . He] is one of that small band who have made art criticism a...

The Depression Era photographs of Walker Evans (1903-1975) remain some of the most indelible and iconic images in the American consciousness. James R. Mellow's landmark biography of Evans-the first to make use of all his diaries, letters, work logs, and contact sheets-shows that Evans was not the social propagandist that many presume, but rather a fastidious observer, recording, simply, the way things were. Walker Evans is not only one of the most finely wrought portraits of a major American artist ever, it is also a fascinating cultural history of America in the 1930s and '40s.

Just fifty years ago the literary critic Lionel Trilling spoke of liberalism as not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition in American society. At the turn of the twentieth century this is clearly no longer the case, when conservative ideas have succeeded in many areas of public policy. Yet America s mainstream institutions the media, the academy, popular culture, religion, the law remain largely under the sway of a liberal ethos. In this incisive collection of essays which appeared originally in The New Criterion, nine distinguished critics and observers examine the...

Can the cultural values that have distinguished Western civilization survive the present-day preoccupation with relativism and the quest for pleasure? In this important and wide-ranging collection of essays, ten distinguished critics reflect on the direction of our society, emphasizing both the dangers that threaten our institutions and the vivifying survivals that are worthy of being cherished and nurtured. Among the contributors, Robert H. Bork considers the contemporary assaults on the tradition of law; Anthony Daniels, the English doctor and essayist, finds that he must defend the...

Ten distinguished observers confront the pervasive attack on the moral and cultural achievements of European civilization, and reflect on the fate of Europe's legacy. Caustic and convincing...a thought-provoking collection of essays. Norman Davies, Wall Street Journal"