The Latest(ish)
One of the more poignant features of the current competition among Republican presidential hopefuls, fiercely fighting for a chance to lose to Senator Clinton in 2008, has been a series of missions to Maggie. Mitt Romney saw Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, late last year in Washington, D.C., while Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani were at pains to include meetings with the Iron Lady in the course of their recent trips to London. The political consequences of such encounters will, I’d guess, be minimal, but the briskly written, perceptive, and, ultimately, moving “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A [...]
We Happy Two
November 5, 2007
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage by Nicholas Wapshott; published originally in The New York Sun
The disparate, jostling artistic movements grouped together and loosely labeled as “modernist” may have been gathering pace before 1914, but it was the moral, spiritual, and physical devastation left by four years of war that allowed them to play such a prominent role within the cultural avant-garde of what remained of Europe. “Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935″ is a fascinating, striking, and intellectually ambitious exhibition now showing at the New York Public Library. It attempts to demonstrate that the agenda and the aesthetics of modernism had a key part to play in the identity that the [...]
False Dawn
November 1, 2007
Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935 (NY Public Library); published originally in The New York Sun