Algis Valiunas

Charles Dickens penned a modern quasi-mythic trove of Christian wisdom and, above all, joy.

Maybe if one were to call self-actualization by another name, its stigma would be reduced. So call it self-perfection instead, and think of Goethe as its finest embodiment.

Except for Aristotle, no scientist before or since Alexander von Humboldt can boast an intellect as universal in reach as his and as influential for the salient work of his time. His neglect today is unfortunate but instructive.

American historiography — the writing of our history — has never been a more hotly contested political battleground than it is today.

William Wordsworth was the greatest of the English Romantics, innovative in form and content, yet with a lasting influence on the conservative sensibility in culture and politics. Now he, along with Shakespeare and perhaps John Milton, belongs to the exclusive company of English poets whose names even the minimally educated are almost certain to have heard.

Thomas Mann never could explain what the world was, but he did a masterly job of portraying it in all its glorious and bedeviled complication.

There is a masterly and instructive literature that treats of epidemics far more frightful than that of COVID-19, and reminds us what human beings are capable of, in the way of nobility and depravity, when the question of whether one will live out the week is a 50-50 proposition.

Twentieth-century terror for terror’s sake—mass suffering and death at the call of a tyrant’s devastating whim, in the service of absolute nihilism—ravaged the soul of the Russian people. Their soul’s current pitiable state bespeaks the ordeal through which it passed under the evil regime of Soviet communism.

Everyone knew what a man Samuel Johnson was, the very best of the best. If only he had known it himself.

As Alan Turing mentally constructed his universal machine, the very foundations of mathematics — the basis for the modern understanding of the physical world — were called into question. As he pondered the similarities between the mind of man and the mind of the machine, the traditional meaning of our humanity was challenged.

Renowned above all for his flights of lyric sublimity, Percy Bysshe Shelley could be as ravishingly melancholy as John Keats and as tenderly exultant as William Wordsworth. Yet his verse could be flagrantly unlovely in the service of his political hatreds, which were many and fierce.

Henrik Ibsen’s daring created the taste by which he is now appreciated. He was the arch-poet of emancipatory liberalism.