Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English, by Ben Yagoda (Princeton University Press): American fascination with British culture doesn’t just end with the Royal Family, English rock musicians, or television programming. Ben Yagoda, a retired professor of English and journalism, has been documenting the American adoption of British words and phrases on his blog Not One-Off Britishisms for well over ten years, and now some of the best entries have been compiled and published in the book Gobsmacked! “Kerfuffle,” “gadget,” “to go missing”—this British invasion has been so successful that some of these terms are now just as at home in the States as they are across the pond. Keep an eye out for Harry Mount’s review of the book in a forthcoming issue of The New Criterion. —SM
Beethoven’s Seventh and Víkingur Ólafsson at the New York Philharmonic (October 4–8): Concert audiences today seem to leap at the chance to give a standing ovation to most anything. Imagine, then, the reception for Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 at its Leipzig premiere in 1859, which featured the composer as the soloist and was by all indications performed beautifully. As the last strains of the coda faded away, awkwardness ensued: “three hands attempted to fall slowly one into another,” Brahms recorded wryly, but soon “a quite distinct hissing sound from all sides forbade such demonstrations.” “In spite of it all, the concerto will be well liked some day when I have improved its anatomy,” Brahms continued—and he was right on the money. This Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday, the star pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, returning to New York after a sellout recital at Carnegie Hall last season, will join Manfred Honeck and the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall in the concerto along with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. —IS
The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt, by Sam Watters (D Giles Limited): The architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827–95) was the original American in Paris. Yankee-born in Brattleboro, Vermont, he was the first American to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. With a wide-eyed appreciation of Western forms, Hunt mixed neoclassicism with the Gothic and Romanesque to create many of the grandest structures of the Gilded Age while inspiring new directions in American architecture. The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt, Sam Watters’s new book on the “Architecture & Art for an American Civilization,” out this month from D Giles Limited, follows Hunt’s upbringing, education, and prolific output through two hundred illustrations and new photography by Michael Froio, covering his work from the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, to Newport’s most opulent “cottages,” to the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. —JP
“Fifth Avenue Architecture and Society: America’s Street of Dreams,” with Mosette Broderick, at the General Society Library (October 1): Trollope quipped in the 1860s that he had “never walked down Fifth Avenue alone without thinking of money.” And though the heart of the avenue was further south in Trollope’s day than it is now, Fifth Avenue still casts a large shadow in the New York imagination, especially the great apartment houses of the early twentieth century fronting Central Park, constructed to anchor the newly fashionable Upper East Side district. Before those somewhat austere stone-clad towers went up, however, there were grand single-family homes in a host of architectural styles. This Tuesday at the General Society Library, Mosette Broderick, Clinical Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University, will speak on the earlier days of Fifth Avenue, a street “synonymous with a lavish fashionable life, grand mansions, and services catering to the wealthy.” Those unable to attend in person may register for a livestream or seek out Broderick’s recent book, Fifth Avenue: History of America’s Street of Dreams (Unicorn Publishing Group). —BR
Dispatch:
“Waxing about Amy,” by Joshua T. Katz. On recent developments in the case against Amy Wax.
Video:
“Roger Kimball,” The Eric Metaxas Show
Roger Kimball, the editor of The New Criterion, joins with a discussion of the latest articles and chat about Greek wine.
From the Archives:
“Baudelaire was better,” by Jeffrey Meyers (November 2012). On La Folie Baudelaire by Robert Calasso.
