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[...] But Russell's Jacobinism is high Tory; it springs from the certitude that birth and genius are impose both the right and the obligation of moral precept. [...] True politics are the art of securing elbowroom for the best; they will alienate the squalor in the world at large that embarrasses o…

"This is very good port they have given me, but why have they given it me in a claret glass."

[...] At numerous points in the political awfulness of the nineteen-thirties, Communism, even Stalinism, seemed to offer the only effective resistance to the triumphant tide of Fascism and Nazism. Scholem had no access to Benjamin's posthumously published Moscow diary. In it he would have found cle…

[...] It is, physically and mentally, well-nigh impossible to read those many hundreds of pages. And yet. As one forces oneself to leaf through this or that passage, the flashes of stylistic genius, of verbal incandescence strike one as might a brusque shiver of light across the sheen of a cesspool…

So it is with the great Russian writers. Their cries for liberation, their appeals to the drowsy conscience of the West are strident and genuine. But they are not always meant to be heard or anwered in any straightforward guise. Solutions can come only from within, from an inwardness with singular …