David Bromwich

David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale, is the author of many books, including Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, Moral Imagination: The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke and How Words Make Things Happen.

Letter
Thomas Meaney explores the connection between the growth of white nationalism and the effects of the Vietnam War on white soldiers returning home (LRB, 1 August). He emphasises the racial divide they came to know in the army. A separate cause of the movement may have been a craving for some violent stimulus commensurate with the excitement of war itself. The correlation between US combat experience...
Letter

Who’s in Charge?

12 July 2017

Jacob Ecclestone finds ‘astonishing’ my assertion that Trump did something unprecedented in publicly boasting that he had delegated total battlefield authority to the generals (Letters, 27 July). The rest of his letter analyses Trump’s decision on 6 April to order the bombing of a Russian airfield in Syria. But that was a piece of calculated political theatre, of no military importance whatever;...
Letter

A Bad President?

5 July 2012

David A. Bell finds my observations on Barack Obama ‘unremittingly acerbic’ and ‘ungenerous’ (Letters, 19 July). I am sorry to have given that impression, but though I didn’t choose the cover line ‘A Bad President’, I won’t disclaim it. The recurrent pattern in which Obama unveils a grandiose design, leaves the detail to others, and at last pronounces significant reform impractical...
Letter

Mistake

27 May 2010

In my Short Cuts about the BP oil disaster, I said the drilling went ‘a mile under the earth’s crust beneath six miles of water’ (LRB, 27 May). A more nearly correct figure would have been ‘three and a half miles under the earth’s crust, beneath a mile of water’.

No Theatricks: Burke

Ferdinand Mount, 21 August 2014

There were at least six great issues on which Burke defended the victims of mistreatment with a steely vigour and an unhesitating sympathy.

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David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his...

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The centre fights back

Lynn Hunt, 22 July 1993

Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is...

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Fiery Participles

D.A.N. Jones, 6 September 1984

Hazlitt is sometimes rather like Walt Whitman, democratic, containing multitudes, yet happy with solitary self-communion. In a pleasant essay called ‘A Sun-Bath – Nakedness’,...

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