1,340 words
Edited by Alex Kurtagić
Editor’s Note:
The following is excerpted from Jonathan Bowden’s Skin, a book he wrote in the early 1990s. The text has been lightly edited, mainly for punctuation, spelling, and capitalization.
In Samuel Beckett’s work . . . , which has become emblematic of the modern condition, Read more …
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) is the greatest work of art and literary criticism since the days of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. It is a work of extraordinary ambition, the most sweeping and synoptic book on Western civilization since Spengler’s Decline of the West. 
Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord
Bryan Magee
The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000
Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (just Wagner and Philosophy in the UK) combines two of my favorite subjects into an informative, stimulating, and highly readable book. Creativity and critical reflection are two very different activities, and excellence in one is seldom accompanied by excellence in the other. Read more …