Not Just a Mirror

“Believing as I do that the arts in general are not merely a mirror reflecting social and cultural values, but are, on the contrary, powerful forces which shape and mould the way in which people live and behave (a view, incidentally, held by every major literary critic from Plato to T.S. Eliot), I have examined …

Just Because a Group is in Formation Doesn’t Mean They Know Where They are Going

“Contemporary authors, playwrights and poets thus find themselves in a disconcerting dilemma. If they attempt to delineate an ideal, they are accused snobbery, of being anti-proletarian, illiberal, undemocratic and, in certain instances, racist. Accordingly, all but a dwindling minority have chosen to join the ‘Raskolnikovian’ ranks of iconoclasts, consoling themselves with the thought that they …

An Unholy Hat Trick

“When men cease to aspire to the ideal, the good, to self-restraint — whether in their arts or their lives — they do not just stand still, but actually turn the other way, finding self-fulfillment in self-indulgence, and in an obsession with those three ultimate expressions of the totally self-centred life: sex, violence and insanity” …