Each week the editors of The New Criterion offer recommendations on what to read, see, and hear in the world of culture in the weekly Critic’s Notebook. To get it first, subscribe to the free Critic’s ...

Jane Coombs on New York City Ballet’s annual Fall Fashion Gala.

None dare say “battle of the bands.” Apologies: I just did. Three weeks ago, the New York Philharmonic, under Gustavo Dudamel, played Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in David Geffen Hall. Last night, the ...

On Georgia O’Keeffe, ancient magic, John Russell Pope, unrequited love & more from the world of culture.

“Make something new, children,” was Richard Wagner’s instruction to a rising generation of musicians whose work struck him as mired in conventionality. He offered this line rhetorically in a 1852 ...

Standing like Shelley’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone,” megaliths have invited speculation throughout history. The premise of Paul Robichaud’s book Stories of the Stones: Imagining Prehistory in ...

Michael Gorra’s The Storytellers: Reading the Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction is among the most beautiful—and wonderful—things that have ever happened to this reader. It’s the work of ...

Which English-language novel dealing with World War II will survive? From Here to Eternity, Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22? Is there any World War II novel that approaches the impact of Ernest ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series.

Aperture’s headquarters on Columbus Avenue & Seventy-eighth Street. Photo: Aperture. Gustavo Dudamel conducts the New York Philharmonic. Photo: New York Philharmonic. “Dudamel Conducts Mahler & Tania ...

Conrad Russell (1878–1947), praised by Evelyn Waugh as “one of the most exquisitely entertaining men I have known,” is unlikely to be known to many today. He may be confused with his younger and ...