Recent stories of note:
“Vargas Llosa Stood for Freedom Against the Nationalist Tide”
Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal
“I learned to read at the age of five,” said Mario Vargas Llosa upon accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. “It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me.” The Peruvian novelist, essayist, and politician died last Sunday at the age of eighty-nine, and his learning to read doubtless stands as an important event for the rest of the world, too. In The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan remembers Vargas Llosa as not only a towering writer, but as a clear-eyed critic on political matters who was once a Castrista but eventually became an opponent of nationalism and an advocate for freedom. Literature, as Llosa said in the same speech, reveals to us “the importance of freedom for life to be livable.”
“British Museum to Loan ‘Some of the Rarest Surviving Examples’ of Ice Age Art to UK’s 2025 City of Culture”
George Nelson, ARTnews
Usually, lending libraries expect their items to get a little beat up over the years. That’s why the British Museum—whose director recently styled it as “a lending library for the world”—rarely loans its fragile Ice Age objects, but this summer, it will make an exception for Cliffe Castle outside of Bradford, England, the place selected by the U.K. government to host various cultural events as the 2025 “City of Culture.” From a twenty-four-thousand-year-old flint point to a surprisingly naturalistic reindeer carved into bone, around seventy objects will travel north from London for the exhibition. A side of Rembrandt, Matisse, and others will be served up for visitors who prefer more recent fare.
Suzanna Murawski is the twelfth and current Hilton Kramer Fellow at The New Criterion. She recently graduated from the University of Chicago and has written on Western art, Hannah Arendt, Augustine of Hippo, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
