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Charles Rosen

Charles Rosen was a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Arthur Rimbaud in bed after Paul Verlaine shot him in the wrist; painting by Jef Rosman, 1873

The Pleasures of Rimbaud

Illuminations

by Arthur Rimbaud, translated from the French and with a preface by John Ashbery

Poems Under Saturn

by Paul Verlaine, translated from the French and with an introduction by Karl Kirchwey

August 18, 2011 issue

‘The Enchanted Island: Before the Cell of Prospero’; engraving of a scene from The Tempest by Jean Pierre Simon after a painting by Henry Fuseli, 1797

The Revelations of Frank Kermode

The Uses of Error

by Frank Kermode

Bury Place Papers: Essays from the London Review of Books

by Frank Kermode

The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative

by Frank Kermode

Shakespeare's Language

by Frank Kermode

June 9, 2011 issue

Isaiah Berlin’s Civilized Malice

The hostile review of Isaiah Berlin’s correspondence by A.N. Wilson in the TLS—which has set off a heated controversy about Berlin and his reputation—exhibited a misunderstanding of university life as well as of the nature of Sir Isaiah’s career. Wilson was unappreciative of Berlin as a historian, comparing him unfavorably with his close contemporary, the Oxford historian A.L. Rowse. Neither were truly major historians but Berlin was not really a historian at all, in the full sense of that word, nor was he exactly a philosopher. His field, largely untrodden and little understood, was the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics and history: in this, his achievement was very great, above all in his profound elucidation of the way that ideas like freedom, enlightenment and nationalism could appear, develop and be challenged in the politics and art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

January 12, 2010

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