The sum of these insults says equally much about the nationality doing the shouting, or at least the perception we have of them: Germans are materialistic and utilitarian, the French still dream of la gloire, the British cherish their splendid isolation, etc.

One of the many differences between Eliot and Pound, in their relations to Yeats, was that Pound did not change his opinion. From the first years in London, he sought out the writers he regarded as important, but he did not haggle over their attributes.

Most of his letters were to his lover, the poet Louise Colet, and it was really too bad for all of us when they broke up two-thirds of the way through the writing of the book.

Near the end of his stay, however, Abrams gave Shesgreen a folder that he had just recently found. Shesgreen’s eyes went wide at what he found inside: a series of e-mails from 1998 exchanged between the anthology’s editors and Norton executives in New York.

The victory of Tariq Ramadan has been due to his ability to manipulate the ignorance of friendly intellectuals—men and women whose intellectuality has been consecrated by a kind of laying-on of the hands of other intellectuals.

The burqa ban, like the headscarf ban a few years ago, is a burqa of its own, since its real purpose is to hide an unattractive political failure.

What is it about contemporary art? Last year’s good is this year’s bad.