Algis Valiunas

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.

Critics once compared the novelist Nelson Algren to Dostoyevsky and Dickens, but even at his best, he lacks Dickens’s warmth of soul and love for middle-class normality, and he does not possess the least trace of Dostoevsky’s intellect or spiritual magnificence.

It would appear our vulnerabilities as a people are laid most bare in the tales we tell about murder, and the evolution of our best-drawn fictional murderers may have much to tell us about the direction in which American life is headed.

A praiseful new intellectual biography of the French philosophe Denis Diderot (1713–1784) offers hope that serious engagement with the past is still possible in the academy.

Without candor and a sense of proportion, the whole truth about the encounter of civilization with barbarism in North America has degenerated into a Hollywood fantasy of unforgivable evildoing on the part of white invaders. A corrective to this woke narrative can be found in the writings of Francis Parkman, the supreme historian of that fateful encounter, which was really a world-historical collision.

Ordinary men and women who would be utterly dumbfounded by the mathematical arcana of Werner Heisenberg’s signature matrix mechanics now deliberate the question of what kind of man he really was. And that question is an eminently fair one for ordinary people to ask.

Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman, all of whom died more than 40 years ago, remain the most famous American poets born in the 20th century. They are known even more for their tortured, prematurely extinguished lives than for their poetry.

Jonas Salk’s achievement, a triumph of character as well as of mind, ought never be forgotten. The least impressive intellect among the famous scientists of the twentieth century, he was — aside from Marie Curie — the most impressive human being.

The French composer Charles Gounod will have a lasting if limited place in the opera house because the lightning struck him once or maybe twice, and feeling of high voltage surged into melody of genius.