Recent stories of note:
“Alcibiades”
Armand, D’Angour, The Critic
The wisest man in all of ancient Athens—Socrates, namely—met Alcibiades as a young man. After their encounter, the philosopher is said to have proclaimed that the boy would grow into either a great man or a singular force of destruction. In the end, he became a little bit of both. Once, as Armand D’Angour reminds us in The Critic, the youth “struck a teacher for dishonouring Homer,” no doubt an understandable reaction, but some of his outbursts were less defensible, as when the serial philanderer threw his wife over his shoulder and carried her home to prevent her from filing for divorce. Later in life, he was condemned to death for allegedly vandalizing images of Hermes. He fled to Sparta, where he struck up a romance with the king’s wife and was yet again condemned to death. This time, he fled to Persia, where he became a military advisor who secretly conspired against Persia on Athens’s behalf. This earned him a pardon in his motherland, and he hastened home. Further antics earned him yet another exile within a year. D’Angour recounts the major beats of this slippery man’s life—for more, look to Daisy Dunn’s treatment in the May 2018 issue of The New Criterion.
“Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago at fifty”
Lee Edwards, Claremont Review of Books
Readers will no doubt find this article’s subject familiar—Gary Saul Morson took up the same topic in the most recent issue of the magazine. But no amount of praise is too much for Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. Morson and Claremont Review of Books’s Lee Edwards both identify what makes the text required reading: the book is not merely about the evils of the Soviet Union, but rather about evil itself. This is what makes it, as Daniel J. Mahoney once declared, the “most powerful antitotalitarian book ever written.” But Edwards reminds us that the book had its fair share of shortsighted detractors, such as the UCLA professor J. Arch Getty, who claimed the book possessed little value for students—an assertion that looks especially reckless now, given how little university students today seem to know of the USSR’s horrors.
“We need the King Charles portrait more than ever”
Alexander Poots, UnHerd
It’s been a rough month for the Royal Family’s image: over the course of just a few weeks, two pictures of Princess Kate and her family were discovered to have been dishonestly edited, and then there was the unveiling of the King Charles’s dismal portrait by Jonathon Yeo. Ghastly and unsettling, the canvas looks as if it has been bathed in blood, and the cloying butterfly placed just over the king’s shoulder does nothing to reduce the scene’s dreadful effect. Despite the painting’s repulsiveness, UnHerd’s Alexander Poots argues that it is a success: it has spread the monarch’s likeness far and wide, which he argues is its primary purpose. But does Yeo’s work really contain the king’s likeness? Is Charles corny, like the butterfly over his shoulder? Is he cadaverous? Tasteless? Ironic? The portrait suggests as much. The predicament is all the more embarrassing when one considers how devoted the king has been to the preservation of high artistic standards—perhaps that explains the quiet despair he showed at the painting’s revealing.