Britain’s Imperial Histories, by Jeremy Black (St. Augustine’s Press): The historian Jeremy Black’s latest volume is a concise and insightful account of some five hundred years of British empire building and imperial strategy. One of the strengths of Britain’s Imperial Histories is its defamiliarizing of the conventional account of British overseas expansion: Black shows that right up until the American Revolution, Scotland and Ireland, and not far-flung American and Indian possessions, were Britain’s overriding imperial concern. The book ends with a particularly trenchant chapter discussing the ongoing debate about the legacy of the British Empire, providing some much-needed nuance to the black legend that now masquerades as British history. —AG
Lost Synagogues of Europe: Paintings and Histories, written and illustrated by Andrea Strongwater (The Jewish Publication Society): “How fair are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel.” The verse from the Book of Numbers appeared over the doorway of the seventeenth-century synagogue of Liuboml, the market town now in Ukraine where Jews once made up a majority of the residents. Like the seventy-six other houses of worship documented and illustrated in Andrea Strongwater’s Lost Synagogues of Europe, the doomed edifice was among the seventeen thousand congregations destroyed during Kristallnacht and subsequent Nazi persecutions, with the remaining wiped out by the Soviets after the war. With a foreword by Ismar Schorsch, the emeritus chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Lost Synagogues of Europe reveals the former vibrancy of the Jewish diaspora in Europe and testifies to the atrocity of its destruction. —JP
The Death of Rabelais, by J. C. Scharl (Wiseblood Books): Twelfth Night is nigh. Whether celebrating on January 5 or 6, and if time permits between carols and wassail, observers of the holiday might consider a reading of J. C. Scharl’s rollicking new verse play, The Death of Rabelais. A continuation of her earlier Sonnez Les Matines, which took place on Shrove Tuesday, Rabelais opens on the titular physician-humorist (no longer the redundancy it once was) at the end of the Christmas season, looking for shelter amid a winter storm. He finds that shelter, a motley company, and more, even swapping roles with a rather obliging Death over the course of Twelfth Night revels. Wisdom is here, too, and not just as a character in the play-within-the-play. —RE
Regency Collectors: Buying and Displaying Old Masters in Early Nineteenth-Century England, by Peter Humfrey (Ad Ilissum): If the advent of the Grand Tour for young British worthies brought many Old Masters across the water, it was the Napoleonic Wars and their attendant disruptions that hastened the flow to a flood. Peter Humfrey, an emeritus professor of art history at St Andrews, tracks the works and collectors of the Regency era in Regency Collectors, an essential book of reference for those interested in how some of the Continent’s greatest artistic treasures ended up on British shores. —BR
“Noseda Conducts Tchaikovsky & Shostakovich” at Lincoln Center (January 7–10): Shostakovich had been closely studying Gustav Mahler when he wrote his Fourth Symphony (1935–36), and the influence of Mahler’s tragic sensibility and burlesque humor shows. Under heavy fire from the Communist Party elite, Shostakovich could not premiere this sprawling, complicated symphony, perhaps his most ambitious, until 1961. Gianandrea Noseda will conduct the Fourth on four dates with the New York Philharmonic this week. For a bit of romantic contrast without leaving Russia’s borders, Behzod Abduraimov will join to play Tchaikovsky’s beloved Piano Concerto No. 1. —IS
Dispatch:
“Paintings & Puritans,” by Jay Nordlinger. On I puritani, by Bellini, at the Metropolitan Opera.
By the Editors:
“The Urbanity of Russell Kirk”
James Panero, The University Bookman
Podcast:
“A Firsthand Look at Getting a NYC Carry Permit”
An interview with James Panero on Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co.
From the Archive:
“Bloomsbury idols,” by Hilton Kramer (January 1984). On a revival of interest in the Bloomsbury Group.
