The Highland Clans, by Alistair Moffat (Thames & Hudson): To Sir Walter Scott, Scotland was the “Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,/ Land of the mountain and the flood.” To his English contemporary Sydney Smith, it was “That knuckle-end of England—that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur.” To Robert Louis Stevenson, a native son of Edinburgh, it was simply “indefinable.” And if Scotland is cryptic, how stranger still are the Highlands, that wild and vast region far outside the country’s Glasgow–Edinburgh belt. In The Highland Clans, newly released in a handy paperback edition, the prolific writer Alistair Moffat brings us up north to meet the characters who have done so much to form the idea of Scotland in the popular imagination. —BR
Teaching the Virtues, by David Hein (Mecosta House): Teaching the Virtues, by the New Criterion writer David Hein, is an appropriate first book for Mecosta House, the new imprint of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. Kirk, like the founders, understood the importance of virtue to the American experiment. As George Washington said in his Farewell Address, “’Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government”; or as John Adams wrote in a letter to Mercy Otis Warren in 1776: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Against an educational system that now seems more invested in teaching the vices, Hein has written an essential primer for reclaiming the virtues in American life. —JP
Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece, by James Romm (W. W. Norton): In 1945 Karl Popper published an indictment of Plato under the subtitle The Spell of Plato. It is this spell—the mystique around the man, a far more shadowy figure than his teacher and dramatic mouthpiece Socrates—that James Romm argues has prevented many scholars from taking seriously Plato’s letters, the philosopher’s only known writings in his own voice. Some are doubtlessly spurious, but others form the basis of Romm’s new book, Plato and the Tyrant, on the philosopher’s relationship with the highly unpopular Syracusan ruler Dionysius the Younger, his disastrous efforts to implement an ideal polis in the Greek city-state, and his composition of the Republic. Did Plato write his most famous dialogue, Romm asks, “in part to explain his missteps in Syracuse, or to obscure them?” —SM
Piano Evenings with David Dubal, season finale, at Grace & St. Paul’s Church (May 20): Some pianists trace their musical heritage back into time, drawing a family tree from teacher to teacher. The branches can get tangled quite quickly—but step back, and they prove a point about the “genes” of the performance tradition, how it lives and evolves from one generation to the next. Familiarize yourself with a few trees, and you may find a new perspective opened to you as a listener (like nobles claiming Charlemagne, many point back to Beethoven in their pedigrees). In his weekly piano salons on the Upper West Side (and in his writing for our own pages), David Dubal is the ideal guide to the greenwoods of piano history. This Tuesday promises a delightful season finale: Amir Ron in Schubert’s expansive late Sonata in A Major, Isaac Parlin in some early Scriabin, Nicolas Namoradze in a new Debussy transcription, and Parlin and Namoradze in cahoots for a transcription of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2. —IS
Podcast:
“Music for a While #102: A contemplation, a cartoon, etc.” Jay Nordlinger, music critic of The New Criterion, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
Dispatch:
“Shakespeare via Adams,” by Jay Nordlinger. On Antony and Cleopatra, by John Adams, at the Metropolitan Opera.
By the Editors:
“Trump in Riyadh: A Rejection of the Globalist Gospel”
Roger Kimball, American Greatness
From the Archives:
“The qualities of Robert Musil,” by Roger Kimball (February 1996). On Musil’s work.
