Listen in to Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler talk about Shane, The Searchers, Lonesome Dove, The Longest Day, Saving Private Ryan, The Bridge on the River Kwai and more movies, Robert Graves’s I Claudius, Mary Renault’s series on Alexander the Great and other novels, and Classics in education. Share This
Aggressors often attack weaker neighbors to restore a sense of pride. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a disaster of a declining population, corruption, authoritarianism, a warped economy, and a high rate of alcoholism. Why, then, would Putin want to ruin additional territory in Crimea and Ukraine the way …
A liberal arts education was once a gateway to wisdom; now it can breed ignorance and arrogance. by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas The humanities are in their latest periodic crisis. Though the causes of the ongoing decline may be debated, everyone accepts the dismal news about eroding university enrollments, ever fewer new faculty positions, …
Our elites would be right at home in Petronius’s world of debauchery and bored melodrama. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Sometime in the mid-first century a.d., an otherwise little known consular official, Gaius Petronius, wrote a brilliant satirical novel about the gross and pretentious new Roman-imperial elite. The Satyricon is an often-cruel parody about how the …
by Bruce S. Thornton // Acculturated.com In the early 80s my mom and her sister dropped by our condo while my wife and I were watching Payday on HBO. (If you’re unfamiliar with this movie and Rip Torn’s brilliant performance, just think Crazy Heart for grown-ups.) They happened to come in during a scene in which Rip Torn’s girlfriend …
In good times, the larger-than-life figure is an affront; in crisis, he is necessary. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Tragic heroes — from Sophocles’ Ajax and Antigone to the Western films’ Shane and Woodrow Call — can be defined in a variety of ways. But the common archetype is a larger-than-life figure. He …
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Tragic View Of course we can acquire a sense of man’s predictable fragilities from religion, the Judeo-Christian view in particular, or from the school of hard knocks. Losing a grape crop to rain a day before harvest, or seeing a warehouse full of goods go up in smoke …