Wilson · June 2026
Woodrow Wilson, Ezra Pound and an homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses
Ezra Pound ruminated on the relationship between literary writing and political writing. Having a Joyce sooner could have spared us a Wilson, he said.
June 17, 2026
Tagged: Wilson
Wilson · June 2026
Review: Angel Down, To the Lighthouse and the communicative difficulties of World War I
These two Great War stories are very different, but they share a harrowing interiority.
June 7, 2026
Disraeli · March 2026
Review: Gore Vidal, inheritor of Disraeli’s tradition, painted a kind of political self-portrait in Julian
"You cannot be both a politician and a writer," Vidal said. But that didn’t stop him from trying.
March 29, 2026
Wilson · January 2026
An aside: Byron and Shelley’s influence on Wilson and Gladstone
Woodrow Wilson worried genius marries badly, because of Shelley’s example. He was thinking of himself. His wife replied sarcastically: “the poor helpless men of genius are not utterly unprotected.”
January 31, 2026
Wilson · November 2025
The Scholar in Politics
Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were a new breed of college-educated politician. Looking back at a time with a tenor different from our own.
November 21, 2025
Wilson · October 2025
An aside: Ellen Wilson and Benjamin Disraeli’s conflicting views of Balzac reveal much
“I feel inclined after this dose of Balzac to equal or exceed you in your contempt for the French,” Ellen Wilson wrote her husband in 1889. Later that contempt would have foreign policy implications.
October 13, 2025