Good morning. First up, Peter Conrad reviews Phillipa Chong’s book of “ponderous piffle” about reviewing.

The international appeal of Robert Burns: “Apart from the Anglophone and Celtic diaspora, he has always been popular in eastern Europe and the Slavic world, especially Russia. Now, says Gerard Carruthers, a professor of literature at Glasgow University, China is showing enthusiasm.”

The polarizing Arnold Schoenberg: “Arnold Schoenberg often happily recalled the military service of his ‘war years’: he called them the best of his life, relieved of the obligation to compose. Schoenberg was also given to remarking on the loneliness and downright notoriety of the path he had taken. Even when he was feted for early, tonal works such as Verklärte Nacht, he recounted in a lecture of 1937, he would hear the complaint: ‘If only he had continued to compose in this style!’ He remains the most controversial of all twentieth-century composers – perhaps, indeed, of all composers. For one notorious issue of the journal Music and Letters, the editor solicited responses to Schoenberg’s death. Ralph Vaughan Williams troubled himself to write ‘Schönberg meant nothing to me—but as he apparently meant a lot to a lot of other people I daresay it is all my own fault’. Yet the venom has been matched by acclaim and devotion.”

Revisiting David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment: “In the 1970s, a social psychologist published ‘findings’ deeply critical of American psychiatric methods. The problem was they were almost entirely fictional.”

Matthew Rose reviews Tom Holland’s Dominion: “When did the world become modern? Holland gives an arresting answer. Modernity began with the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Today, we view human beings as individuals defined by their abilities to reason and to choose, capacities that endow them with moral equality. Holland tells us there was nothing natural or inevitable about this perspective; it is the result of a metaphysical earthquake, two millennia ago, that slowly altered our perception of human life.”

William Hay reviews a promising new account of the American Revolution: “Recounting a story every American schoolchild once knew by heart poses challenges that Atkinson meets by evoking the immediacy of events and individual perspectives. He also brings the British clearly into view as protagonists with intentions of their own rather than mere foils to the eventually triumphant colonists. Many in Britain supported the American cause, as Atkinson shows, while large numbers of colonists remained loyal. Newspapers and Parliament aired their government’s management of a controversial war before the public without censorship or restraint. Both public and Parliament backed the conflict just as they had earlier supported coercion. Despite vocal critics like Edmund Burke, king and ministers stood as firm in their resolve as the Congress in Philadelphia. Blows, as George III had told his prime minister Lord North, must decide matters.”

Essay of the Day:

Despite what the media may want you to believe, we are not in the middle of a race war in America. Wilfred C. Reilly in Commentary:

“A remarkable irony of the modern American conversation is that while race relations have empirically never been better, many members of different races are terrified of one another. Perceptions of crime are a primary source of this tension. The center-left mainstream media run stories almost daily about tough whites attacking blacks and other people of color for trivial reasons, while a substantial cottage industry on the far right focuses on sensational depictions of black crime. In reality, however, incidents like these, which make for almost weekly viral news stories, are quite rare; so, too, is serious interracial crime in general. According to the 2019 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) crime report, blacks made up only 15 percent of those who criminally attacked whites in the United States in 2018. Whites attacked blacks even less often, 11 percent of the time. For good or ill, the person most likely to kill you remains your husband or wife, not an exotic stranger. It is well worth unpacking the actual U.S. national crime data as a means of tamping down tensions among countrymen.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Mount Zao

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