Recent stories of note:
“‘After 1177 B.C.’ Review: How the Bronze Age Turned Iron”
Dominic Green, The Wall Street Journal
In March, Dominic Green treated the Friends of The New Criterion to a brisk anatomy of the twenty-first century’s savages—those who seek to destroy the West’s cultural institutions. But he also offered a hopeful forecast for these institutions’ futures. Now, he’s turned his attention in The Wall Street Journal to some of history’s first cultural annihilators, the Sea Peoples partially responsible for the Bronze Age collapse. Green, in reviewing After 1177 B.C. by Eric Cline, argues that much of the collapse was spurred by these invading forces, but carefully complicates the story by outlining a separate “cascade effect of unpredictable interactions and nonlinear outcomes” that also kicked off the crumbling. And he shows how the complex, dramatic collapse paved the way for “monotheism, coinage, innovations in iron-working, the Greek alphabet,” and democracy itself. Here is a nuanced and compelling investigation of that distant age.
“We have lost an unforgettable teacher and one of Britain’s great critics”
Richard Bratby & Gerard McBurney, The Spectator
Michael Tanner, who died last week, started “listening to music seriously in about 1950.” For more than half of those seventy-plus years he was The Spectator’s opera critic, contributing “as thorough and as stimulating an education in musical aesthetics as one could hope to receive,” in the words of Spectator’s Richard Bratby. But Tanner’s vision expanded far beyond the realm of music. My introduction to him, for example, came by way of a 2017 article in which he diagnoses Kierkegaard with “moral hypochondria”—a wily point characteristic of Tanner’s philosophical criticism. Consider his 1999 essay on Schopenhauer, in which he describes the philosopher’s style of argument as “slithering,” and declares that much of Kant’s framework was “invented” merely because he lazily enjoyed symmetry. Bratby and Gerard McBurnery knew Tanner for decades, and their recollections of him in The Spectator leave little doubt as to the critic’s greatness.
“Keystones of Britain’s history”
James Stevens Curl, The Critic
In America, where no medieval art or architecture exists, it is unsurprising to hear complaints about the period’s strange visual vernacular. It is both temporally and geographically foreign. But to hear whining about it from those lucky enough to live beside such feats—Europeans, namely—has always struck me as baffling. James Stevens Curl of The Critic shares this dismay, detailing the many ways in which England’s education has improperly acquainted its youth with this rich heritage. Curl has found that most students have never stepped foot in the British Isles’ architectural wonders and have no means to interpret their many details. But, in this bittersweet essay, he notes that these students are typically “overawed” or even “terrified by the buildings” when they enter them for the first time—and this awe only grows as they are taught more.