Recent links of note:

“‘Orwell’ Review: A Fresh Biography of Truth’s Champion”
Dominic Green, The Wall Street Journal

On January 21, 1950, in a hospital near the London building that inspired the Ministry of Truth, Eric Blair died from tuberculosis, only a few months after marrying for a second time. His new wife, Sonia Brownell, was the basis for the character Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Better known by his pen name, George Orwell the author “deliberately obscured Blair the man,” writes Dominic Green in a review of D. J. Taylor’s new biography, Orwell: The New Life, published by Pegasus. The biography builds upon Taylor’s original of 2003, Orwell: The Life, by exploring the author’s private world through recently discovered letters and interviews. Taylor’s six-hundred-page work details each stage of Orwell’s life, from his childhood in British India, to his “mediocre” performance at Eton, to his experience as a policeman in Burma, to his time fighting for the Republicans in Spain, and to his job manufacturing war propaganda for the BBC. Be on the lookout for a full review by John P. Rossi of Taylor’s biography in the upcoming volume of The New Criterion.

“An invisible €171m renovation: Dutch royal palace reopens after five-year-long underground project”
Ida Jager, The Art Newspaper

The Dutch royal palace of Het Loo, designed in the symmetrical Dutch Baroque style by Jacob Roman and Johan van Swieten, was built in 1686 as a hunting lodge for William of Orange, the Dutch stadtholder who became the king of England, Ireland, and Scotland two years later. A state museum exhibiting Dutch treasures from the royal collection since 1984, the palace has undergone extensive construction projects over the past five years, at a price totaling €171 million. The renovations of Het Loo, a palace known as the “Versailles of the North,” carries its reputation into the twenty-first century, adding a large subterranean complex beneath the courtyard’s dazzling fountain in a way that doesn’t disturb the palace’s splendor, reports Ida Jager for The Art Newspaper. In addition to the new space—built by the Rotterdam-based firm KAAN Architecten to be used for temporary exhibitions—palace walls, ceiling paintings, tapestries, chandeliers, and seventeenth-century floors have been restored to their former glory. Het Loo will certainly make for a compelling stop on a summer tour of Northern Europe.

“Classics: Inside Out and Upside Down”
Joshua T. Katz, Academic Questions

How important are the classics? This is the basic question asked by Joshua T. Katz in an adaptation of his talk for a conference on classical studies last November sponsored by the Academy of Athens. He ponders this in response to dwindling student interest in the humanities, as well as in response to calls from many of his peers in the academy to burn down the field of classics. These peers wish to shift the study away from its traditional focus on Ancient Greece and Rome as a part of a broader trend in revising all fields of scholarship to abide by new-age morals and ethics, heavily focused on race. Katz himself is “unable to imagine what evidence for this assertion [that the Classics are irredeemably white-supremacist] would even look like.” Scholars who, as part of this ideology, make this assertion are turning the study of the Classics “inside out,” and the results, as Katz describes, are objectively shocking—Princeton, for example, no longer requires Classics majors to have any proficiency at all in either ancient Greek or Latin because it is too much of a burden, the university argues, for diverse students. The defense against this attack, Katz posits, begins with a recommitment to the humanities, the study of the Classics, and philology in its broad sense.

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