Algis Valiunas

Fellow

Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.

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Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.

A literary essayist, his writings have appeared in Commentary, the Weekly StandardNational ReviewFirst Things, the American Spectator, the New Criterion, and the Claremont Review of Books. They have also appeared in various collections, including most recently The Best Spiritual Writing, 2013 (Penguin, 2012). He is also the author of the book Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study (Encounter, 2002). He holds degrees from Dartmouth College; Trinity College, Cambridge; and the University of Chicago, where Saul Bellow was his doctoral dissertation adviser in the Committee on Social Thought.

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America’s Shakespeare

Algis Valiunas

For Americans, Shakespeare has been a figure of particular reverence, yearning, and vexation. He has stood for the time-honored refinements of civilization that Americans, as late starters, have not yet had time to nourish into full flower. But he has also been the paragon whom stout-hearted democrats believe themselves destined to surpass.

Articles

Voice of Civilization

Algis Valiunas

Like Herodotus, Thucydides, Montaigne, and Proust, Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was a one-book wonder.

Articles

A Historian’s Craft

Algis Valiunas

The historian’s ideal, and such happiness as he enjoys, is very like the Greek philosopher’s, like Aristotle’s in particular. How far Jacob Burckhardt upheld that ideal is a question that historians and political men will continue to dispute in time to come, for his is a mind that matters, in its passion and dispassion.

Articles

Shakespeare’s Savior

Algis Valiunas

Henry Folger made it his life’s work to gather up scattered British treasure and bring it to America for conservation.

Articles

The Man Who Loved Hitler

Algis Valiunas

A new biography of Josef Goebbels depicts a man consumed by personal ambition, the fate of German culture, and the raving hatred propagated by his master.

Articles

A Seventh Note

Algis Valiunas

A new book on the siege of Leningrad does valuable service to the city’s years of supreme ordeal and the famous tribute by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Articles

King of Pain

Algis Valiunas

Just about everyone who pays any attention at all to contemporary fiction knows two things about David Foster Wallace (1962-2008):…

Articles

Claremont Review of Books / March 5, 2012

Mastering the Master

Algis Valiunas

The Peloponnesian War is renowned, and notorious, as the most momentous and destructive conflict of the classical Greek world, surpassing…

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Starlight in Hell

Algis Valiunas

One cannot say with assurance that Russia has outdone all other modern nations in cruelty; the competition is just too…

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Ring’s Inner Circle

Algis Valiunas

Richard Wagner (1813-83) remains, and likely will long remain, one of the three greatest operatic composers who have ever lived,…

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Socking the Angel

Algis Valiunas

A semi-invalid stricken young with lupus who lived with her mother in a small Georgia town and attended Mass every…

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