PAUL JOHNSON:Indispensable Encounters

...Leavis...

...The Islamic world, having failed the first time, was bracing for the second attack, this time not conducted by Arabs and Moors, but by Turks and Tartars...

...In the United States, happily, there are still one or two which keep the tradition going, notably Commentary and the New Criterion...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W The Muslim attack on Christendom… has gone through three phases...

...Commentary is stronger on religion and politics, the New Criterion on literature and the arts...

...Finally, there is the sheer quality of the writing...

...Osama bin Laden saw it otherwise, saying, “We have met, defeated, and destroyed the more dangerous and the more deadly of the two infidel superpowers...

...and gives a gloomy but well-reasoned answer, and Kimball offers his thoughts on re-reading John Buchan, that ambitious Scots imperialist who combined high-minded statesmanship with the enviable ability to tell a rattling good adventure tale...

...Dealing with the soft, pampered and effeminate Americans will be an easy matter...

...The first is the belief that there are absolute standards, not just in literature and the arts, but in public conduct and philosophical treatment of fundamental issues...

...Far less obvious, however, is the essay on “Thomas Kuhn’s Nationalism,” contributed by the science writer James Franklin, or the reassessment of Edward Bellamy’s utopia novel, Looking Backward, by that sharp-eyed literary critic, Martin Gardner...

...After a long and bitter struggle, the Christians managed to retake part, but not all, of the [European] territory they had lost...

...There is a wonderful piece by James Penrose, the journal’s regular music critic, on Donald Francis Tovey, author of the British classic, Essays in Musical Analysis, and Brooke Allen, author of that excellent book, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, contributes a delightful and (to me) nostalgic piece on that rascally but endearing novelist, Simon Raven...

...Anthony Daniels and Theodore Dalrymple are our two leading commentators on physical, mental, and indeed spiritual health, and Paul Paul Johnson’s many books include Modern Times, Intellectuals, A History of the English People, and A History of the American People...

...Notably they failed to recapture the Holy Land...

...Lewis asserts that phase three of the Muslim attack on Christendom began with the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, which Americans have seen as a “Western victory—more specifically an American victory—in the Cold War...

...They, like the journal that gives them the ries of our culture, as well as strictly disciplined detes- hospitality of its pages, form a wide but also intimate tation of trends and individuals that disgrace it...

...Both are highly literary and lightly (but firmly) edited, and both do honor to their country...

...Both are indispensable...

...Naturally, the bulk of the material deals with American creators, personalities, and issues, none of them hackneyed, however, and some of them important but difficult subjects overlooked by the rest of the media...

...This is a very important task which, so far as I know, is undertaken by no other periodical...

...John Derbyshire, a columnist for National Review, has a well-judged essay on Aldous Huxley...

...80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 Indispensable Encounters Counterpoints: Twenty-Five Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts Edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer (IVAN R. DEE, 500 PAGES, $35) Reviewed by Paul Johnson However, the New Criterion, as this compilation shows, goes some way to supplying the lack of a truly civilized and intelligent review on our side of the Atlantic, for many of its contributors are British, and the topics touched upon often involve English literature...

...I would hate to have to choose between them...

...A third and important propensity is an eagerness to rescue from oblivion writers, artists, and ideas that have fallen from favor but are still relevant to our needs, and enjoyable...

...John Gross, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is perhaps our outstanding man of letters...

...In general, and thanks certainly to the consistency with which Kramer and Kimball have conducted the journal, the New Criterion is notable for four qualities...

...One gets the , Roger Kimball, who between them have a detailed ability to organize their material, and their liveliness knowledge and acute feelings about most of the glo- of idiom...

...David Pryce-Jones is our leading expert on the Middle East...

...Iklé lays down how it must be defeated in a book that should be read by every serious citizen, especially those responsible for our national survival...

...In Britain, since the extinction of Encounter, there are none, unless you count Prospect, which is a bit too attached to the European Union to qualify as a politically independent magazine...

...The real control HE SHEER RANGE AND VARIETY of the essays in even in its bes of quality is exercised by the selection of the writers who are notable for their clarity of expression, their t days, so tiresome...

...It’s both natural and right for a journal of this kind to write about “The Legacy of Russell Kirk” and “The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky”—and both are dealt with in authoritative and trenchant fashion...

...There is nothing formulaic about the journal, none of the emollient uniformity that made the New Yorker, J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 8 1...

...In the anthology under review, of the 40 or so authors, Roger Scruton is a well-known English philosopher, jack-of-all controversies, and rider-tohounds...

...Lewis continues: “This belief was confirmed in the 1990s when we saw attacks on American bases and installations with virtually no effective response of any kind—only angry words and expensive missiles dispatched to remote and uninhabited places...

...When the peoples of Asia and Africa invaded Europe, this was not imperialism...

...British literary and arts subjects also command attention from minds ranged on both sides of the Atlantic...

...Fperiodicals have played a major part in the culgh Review Edinbur the OR MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES , serious , beginning with , well-written ture of the Anglo-Saxon world...

...Again, Europe counterattacked, this time more successfully and more rapidly...

...As an Englishman, I am envious and sad that we have no equivalents...

...Genuine originality, provided it is combined with skill and experience, is always acceptable and applauded...

...That list in itself shows the breadth of the British reservoir of talent from which the New Criterion draws its authors...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W Dean, head of English at Oxford’s famous Dragon School, is one of our top grammarians...

...Kramer asks, “Does Abstract Art Have a Future...

...Gertrude Himmelfarb has some wise and penetrating things to say about Lord Acton...

...They failed to retake North Africa or the Middle East, which were lost to Christendom...

...Tolicity of the editors this volume is, of course, a tribute to the cath, Hilton Kramer and impression that editing is minimal...

...Kenneth Minogue, the economist, though antipodean by birth, is very much part of the London intellectual scene...

...Lewis concludes: “The third phase” of the Muslim attack on Christendom “has clearly begun...

...There are also good pieces on the Victorian sporting novelist Robert Surtees and the irascible Cambridge literary pundit, F.R...

...modernity’s tenebrae...

...The first is from the beginning of Islam, when the new faith spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was born, into the Middle East and beyond...

...They succeeded in recovering Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, and in advancing farther into the Islamic lands, chasing their former rulers from whence they had come...

...It is one of the chief reasons why I always look forward with relish to opening a copy of the New Criterion...

...The review is suspicious of relativism in any form but especially of its moral manifestations...

...That was not the end of the matter...

...Each has its strengths and limitations...

...Now there are very few of them...

...They circle of civilized men and women who light wise make an unusually well-matched team, and both candles in a world that often seems threatened by make characteristic contributions to this volume...

...In our own time, we have seen the end of that [period of European] domination [of the Middle East...

...But here fashion gets short shrift, and every kind of specious neologism and euphemious dodging is cracked down on hard...

...When Europe attacked Asia and Africa, it was...

...An American president had interns to chase and impeachment to thwart...

...I enjoyed too Mark Steyn’s appreciation of that accomplished man of the theater, George Abbott (“Missing Mister Abbott”), and the treatment of the “New York School Poets” by the Broadway critic John Simon...

...Secondly, the paper and its contributions avoid any commitment to ideology and party but have a general disposition or temperament inclined to recognize the merits of long-established cultural facts, and to subject all novelties to skeptical scrutiny...

...From this phase of the European counterattack [the late 16th century] a new term was invented: imperialism...