Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors

Is Rick Perry the next Ferdinand II? I mean, Ferdinand was taken up, in at least his later years, with a messianic vision of himself as the "Bat" who would defeat the antichrist, drive the Moors out of Grenanda, and then free Jerusalem from the Muslims, heralding the second coming. Rick Perry, as I understand it, wants to recapture the "seven mountains" of culture, including the government, also in preparation for the second coming.

So what becomes of heretics like me? Ferdinand's response was to reinvigorate the inquisition (its roots run back really to Theodosius I, and it had been used sporadically until the Albigensian crusade, but Reston makes a case that the "old" inquisition had been sporadic and occasional whereas the "new" Spanish inquisition was systematic and habitual) and use it to spread terror, enforcing thought control. Under the instigation and direction of Torquemada, who became the first Grand Inquisitor (is it he in Ivan's parable?), Ferdinand saw the inquisition as unifying the Spanish kingdom, bringing the recalcitrant and sometimes rebellious nobility under his control, and increasing the revenue available to fight his war against the Moors through confiscation of property. How many "heretics" were burned in Torquemada's auto de fes? How many people turned in their neighbors under torture or the threat of torture? How many of them confessed to acts they never committed? Do Rick and his brethren have that in mind for me?

It's hard to say how much Ferdinand's zeal was driven by his belief or how much of it was a cynical politician's use of religion to bring about his political ends (hmmm…so just how is that different from Perry?) While Reston does suggest that Ferdinand came to believe his ordained role as the trigger man for the apocalypse, he also notes that Machiavelli used Ferdinand as his model of the Prince in creating the "first modern political state." After joining the kingdoms of Aragon and Castille and then defeating the Portugese, Ferdinand and Isabella brought about centralized authority and taxation with the help of a national police force manned by a religious brotherhood, the Hermandad: "the effect was to centralize power and spread fear throughout the land."

And what are the best tools at hand for a politician to accomplish the building of a unified state? A common enemy and a convenient scapegoat will generally do the trick. The common enemy was the Kingdom of Grenada, the last stronghold of Al Andalus in Europe. The "Reconquista" had been a major goal of almost every king in Europe since Charles the Hammer finally stopped the Islamic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 732. And the inquisition played on popular bigotry by targeting mainly the Conversos--Jews who had forcibly converted to Christianity in earlier pogroms--for being insincere in their conversions or for having lapsed back into Jewish practices. That Ferdinand could latch onto the Converso's property to help fund his wars was a real bonus.

This led to the "other 1492," the expulsion of Jews from Spain. But what counted now wasn't religion but blood, "limpieza de sangre," purity of blood. Which, of course, is a total farce. The people of Spain were a mixed blood lot from the earliest of times: paleolithic hunter gatherers with a mixture of Anatolian pastoral and agricultural peoples, overlain with major migrations/invasions from Celts, Phoenicians, Carthagenians, Romans, Alans, Suebi, Vandals, Visigoths, Arabs and Berbers--to cite only the most obvious and numerous--except for the Jews, of course, who migrated here early and interbred with most of the different people. Reston points out that Ferdinand, Isabella, and Torquemada all had Converso heredity in their own backgrounds, as did the majority of the Spanish nobility.

Persecution of the Jews had gone back to at least Hellenic times, with Greeks and Jews killing each other in the streets of Alexandria, and Jews were slaughtered by the thousands during the Crusades. Spain experienced a major outbreak of antisemetic zealotry in 1391, leading to forced mass conversions of Jews to Christianity (a widespread practice in Spain since Visigothic rule), but with the centralized authority of the state joined with the revitalization of the Inquisition, wholesale skepticism and eventual denial of converso sincerity held public opinion, especially with incitement from the pulpit. All Jews were forced to convert or to leave Spain in 1492. Those who converted and remained behind then made up the overwhelming majority of the cases tried by the Inquisition panels.

But that's just one strand running through the book. The defeat of Grenada, with its own cast of characters, including the last emir, Boabdil the Unfortunate, who was clearly unsuited for the task of ruling Grenada or fighting the Spanish, and who essentially sold out his people and his kingdom for a comfortable retirement. Add in Columbus, who comes strutting on the stage with his grandiloquent plans of finding a shorter route to the palace of the Great Khan, but unable to find anyone to take him seriously until after the Moors are defeated, eventually limps off disgraced and disillusioned, but not until whole tribes began to go extinct. The book covers a true "hinge of history" when Ferdinand and Isabella take their small feudal kingdoms and turn them into the Spanish empire.

Reston tells this story by drawing on multiple personalities, including not only Ferdinand and Isabella, Torquemada and Columbus, and also Boabdil the Unfortunte, but so many others, including King Joao II of Portugal, Enrique the Impotent--Isabella's brother, Muley Hassan--who contended with Boabdil, his nephew, for control of Grennda, Abraham Senior and Don Abravano--Jews who worked as advisors to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella but nonetheless suffered the fate of their fellow Jews, and Rodrigo Borgia--who later became Pope Alexander VI, infamous in his own right but even more famous as the father of Cesare and Lucretia Borgia. It really is quite a formidable cast of characters, and I find so little to admire in any of them.

Perhaps that is a major weakness of this book, then, that in trying to tell a good story, Reston overplays his details and maybe plays a bit loose with the facts. He certainly bends the tale in a modern, secular direction. He has often been accused of the novelization of history--sometimes an almost breathless "in media res" approach to history, surmising what his characters thought and how they reacted to one another--you can almost sense the animal magnetism of Isabella for Columbus or feel the scornful rage of Torquemada for Ferdinand and Isabella when he thought the expulsion ediict was being compromised. I guess the most egregious example, though, is Boabdil's mother, Ayxs, whose contempt Reston imagines as driving Boabdil into a disastrous battle with Ferdinand, and then who heaped further scorn on him for being such a wimp, or something to that effect.

But the bottom line is, Reston tells a good story. I quite enjoyed the read and got a better understanding of the time and the events. I came to the book wanting a better idea of what drove Spinoza's thinking, as Rebecca Goldstein makes it clear that his Converso background gave him the questions and the concerns culminating in the Ethics and the Tractatus. This book didn't really give me any insight in that direction, but it has lead me onto further inquiry into the history of antisemitism. For the truth is, I just don't get it. You can draw a straight line from Ferdinand (and Isabella, though Reston doesn't really impute any kind of cynicism on her part) and the Spanish Kingdom to Hitler and Nazi Germany, and I continually draw a blank on how such atrocities can happen. All I can hope is that we're not on the cusp of some new catastrophe.

Author: Reston, James

Date Published: 2005

Length: 384

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Horseman, Pass By

This was McMurtry's first novel, and it feels like it. While it is a good story, it certainly doesn't rate with Last Picture Show or even Leaving Cheyenne. It does have the west Texas bleakness built into it, but it's not the book that you might expect from the buildup surrounding Hud. I first read it years ago and enjoyed more than this time, so it may also have something to do with the narrator. Just a bit too hang-dog, I guess.

Jimmy told me years ago that his uncle Jack and a number of his cronies reminded him of Hud, the same wild ass, amoral characters that seemed to populate West Texas. I guess that mom's cousin Vernon could go in that same mold: good lucking guys driven around by their dicks and general lack of scruples. But Hud wasn't nearly as unscrupulous as I remembered him from my first reading. Even his shooting of Homer makes sense in terms of relieving suffering. And then he's the one that makes Lonnie seem respectable at the church during the funeral.

The book is really about Homer and the way of life that is dying with him, the old cowboy who has worked the ranch for so long. He finally breaks under the pressure of the last catastrophe, in a life filled with catastrophes, and one that was brought on by his buying cattle on the cheap from Mexico. There is something to be said about Hud's negative judgement of Homer. It's just that we see Homer through Lonnie's worshipful eyes. And maybe it's really Lonnie's voice that I don't enjoy so much. McMurtry uses the first person narrator so seldom, and maybe there's a good reason for it.

Author: McMurtry, Larry

Date Published: 1961

Length: 7 hr 34 min

Narrator: McCue, Kevin

Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

Betraying Spinoza means trying to tie him down to a particular time, place, personality, circumstance, and that's just what Rebecca Goldstein accomplishes in this book. She brings her sensitivities both as a philosopher and as a novelist to bear on Spinoza in such a way that vivifies him and his thought by placing him in the matrix of the times and the community that he inhabited. She also makes it clear that Spinoza would object strenuously to such particularizing as trivial. The circumstances of his life were irrelevant to the real task of understanding reality.

The central experience of his life was his excommunication by the Jewish community in Amsterdam. I was disturbed by the decree the first time that I read it years ago in Will Durant's history of philosophy, and wondered at its severity. Goldstein makes it clear that the preoccupations of this community, just a generation removed from the persecution and expulsion first by the Spanish ("the other 1492") and then by  the Portugese, not only triggered Spinoza's excommunication but also drove his thinking to finding a way out of the problems of suffering and identity that dominated La Naçao, the former Marranos living in Holland. "It was the community itself that had made the problem of personal identity of such crushing exigency for Spinoza that a way simply had to be found out of it, even though the way would set him at irreconcilable odds with that community."

Forced to live as Christians under Spanish and Portugese rule, most Marranos had to practice Judaism as secretly as possible, risking torture and death if found out. Goldstein suggests that Theresa of Avila (coming from a family of Conversos, or Jewish converts to Christianity) also came out of this environment where spirituality was strictly a matter of private observance. Having lost the knowledge of many or most of Judaism's essential practices and beliefs over the years, a fierce debate broke out over what constituted Jewish identify. Can the Marranos still in Portugal, for example, still be considered Jewish even though they were forced to practice Christianity? Much of the debate was fueled by a strong steak of kabbalism among the Sephardic Jews and the problems of suffering and identity become questions of cosmic redemption.

But Spinoza, in a classic case of reframing, saw his excommunication as an opportunity to pursue the problems of meaning and intelligibility without fear of offending the community. "The first and foremost rule is to remember that we have no control over anything other than the progress of our own understanding. And the second rule is to care only about that over which we have control." He couldn't offend them because he was now completely and totally cut off from the community. Amsterdam Jews were even forbidden to speak his name, much less acknowledge his presence. That didn't keep him from offending the rest of Europe, however, as the "atheist jew" pursued the meaning of life, the universe, and everything without any reference to an external creator God.

The first thing to understand about Spinoza's thought is that the "world is…intelligible, through and through." Goldstein calls this the presumption of reason: "All facts have explanations. For every fact, there is a reason why it is true." "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." That's not to say that we know it all, for we're trying to understand an infinite universe with a finite mind. But logic can reveal the fabric of reality because "logic alone is the fabric of reality." Interestingly enough, Goldstein, who comes out of the empiricist school  that would find such ideas nonsensical, seems to accept this premise as she considers the alternatives, citing David Hume that the rejection of the presumption of reason leads to the mind being just a series of mental events with no necessary connection to reality.

Spinoza begins with a few basic premises and proceeds to discover reality by using deductive logic. "By that which is self caused (causa-sui), I mean that of which the essence involves existence." (Is this the formula that Sartre stood on end when he said that existentialism means that existence precedes essence?) Only Substance is self caused, and so Substance = Nature [as in Laws of Nature] = God. All that is. What is, is, and that's all there is. There is nothing external or outside this. There is no God different from nature. There is no spirit different from matter. There is no soul different from body. Every separate thing in the universe, then, is a "logical entailment" or mode of the Substance. But as Goldstein makes clear, this is more than just an exercise in metaphysics. Bento's message is one of salvation using reason and logical proofs. "Salvation is achieved by bringing the vision of the causa-sui -- the vast and infinite system of logical entailments of which each of us is but one entailment--into one's very own conception of oneself." "Spinoza turns the Cartesian methodology…to illuminate the mysteries of the kabbalists:…the beginning of all things, the Ein Sof's [That Without End] relationship to creation and to our knowledge, the mysteries of evil and suffering."

Here Goldstein leads into a discussion of "conatus" which is any thing's identity with itself. It's that which makes me me, or you you. The logical and automatic consequence of the "conatus" is that everything seeks, as far as possible, to further it's own well being. "Our very essence, our conatus, will lead us, if only we think it through, to a vision of reality that, since it is the truth, is in our interests to attain." This leads to "dispassionate knowledge of oneself…the most self-expansive of all experiences, the most liberating, the boundaries of one's self stretching to incorporate the infinite system of explanations that constitute the very world." Goldstein calls this ecstatic rationalism, but Spinoza calls it "amor dei intellectis," the intellectual love of God. (This was certainly not a God that would love us back, but Spinoza's love of God does not depend on God loving us.) Taking this point of view then takes us outside the contingent situations of time and place and personality and circumstances. "To the extent that we are rational, we, all of us, partake in the same identity." To be caught up in the contingent, then, weakens us, leading to suffering, pain and evil.  (Isn't this essentially what Gautama said in the fifth century BC, that avidya [ignorance] leaks to dukkha [suffering]?) But is it possible to live and thrive with such an objective, dispassionate point of view?

Spinoza says that pursuit of anything else will not lead to that which all men seek: continuous, supreme, unending happiness. It is only through reality itself that we will reach the highest possible state of emotional well-being. "When we are able to grasp its infinite sweep, to sense the infinite context embracing each finite modification, then there is supreme, continuous, and unending happiness." Is this what we want? Goldstein questions this outlook: "I would argue that the highest level of imagination also amounts to a sort of love. I would further argue that the imaginative acts by which we try to grasp the substance of others, that specific singularity of them that resists universalizing into the collective, rational impersonal are a necessary component of the moral life." And so she brings us around to a view of Spinoza that is both personal and particular, and while it may not lead us to supreme happiness, it certainly deepened my understanding of the man and his thought and has led me to grapple with the issues of being human from yet another perspective. Can there be anything more moral in a book?

Author: Goldstein, Rebecca

Date Published: 2006

Length: 304 pp

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Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

We're all of us going to fuckin' die, and it's not going to mean a goddamned thing. Nothing that we've done or thought or felt means jack shit. That's Nietzsche in a nutshell. All the rest of it--overman, will to power, eternal recurrence, last man, slave morality, resentiment--is just whistling in the dark.

I mean, the starting point is "God is Dead." That makes Nietzsche the direct heir of Spinoza. And Darwin. This line of thought begins, at least since the Renaissance, with Descartes, who resolves to doubt everything until he can find something that is certain. What he comes up with is the fact that he's aware that he's aware. That's the cogito. From that point he goes on to posit the existence of a soul and of God as distinct from the material universe of things and bodies. But in steps Spinoza who says, Hold on; wait a minute; if there is an ultimate substance to the universe, then it cannot be two. Therefore, everything there is--Life, the Universe, and Everything--can only be one Substance=Nature=God. There is no split between the physical and spiritual, nor between body and soul, nor between God and the Universe. And God is no personal deity to ask favors from or to seek sanctions for the way we live and see the world. 

Nietzsche certainly wasn't the first thinker who recognized that Spinoza's God was cold comfort at best. Leibniz was both enthralled and horrified at this prospect, and Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard sought to refute or challenge the implications of Spinoza's thought. But Nietzsche said, "Bring it on!" and resolved to question everything until he reached the most fundamental implications of those ideas. He ends up with "God is Dead" and the spectre of nihilism haunting the west. As Ivan K. says, if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. And if that's the case, why not just commit suicide and be done with it? Why keep on keepin' on?

Nietzsche saw the something similar happening with the Greeks after the Ionian Enlightenment, and he wondered how they could look at the suffering, calamity, and absurdity inherent in life and still maintain an affirmative attitude, a joyous celebration, even, toward living--"a yet unbroken reply to the vicissitudes of fortune, a triumphant response to suffering, and a celebration of life as, at bottom...indestructible, powerful, and joyous.'" (Is Fred idealizing the Greeks here? I remember the Sophocles who says "Nothing surpasses not being born/but if born, to return where we came from/is next best, the sooner the better.") The Greeks "looked with bold eyes into the dreadful destructive turmoil of so-called world-history as well as into the cruelty of nature" and "without yielding to resignation...reaffirmed life with works of art." What was it that allowed them to do this?

Nietzsche's inquiries lead him, eventually, to three concepts: will to power, the overman, and eternal recurrence. It's kinda bizarre that he would put forth such sweeping and dubious sounding concepts after resolving to question everything. Those ideas have certainly been put to questionable uses, including some of the intellectual underpinings of the Nazi state. But Kaufmann sets out to clear Nietzsche's name from some of these associations and to show how Nietzsche had been misunderstood by just about everyone in the 80 years between Nietzsche's books and the first printing of this book in 1949. 

First off, any meaning that can be found for life, the universe and everything cannot apply to everybody but only the best and the brightest. Man is just another animal, just another primate, and therefore, "the mass of mankind lacks any essential dignity or worth." So "the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest specimens." The rest of us are shit out of luck. Some men--very, very few--look squarely at the apparent absurdity of life, the universe, and everything and then seek to overcome their own natures and give meaning and order to existence. This is the meaning of the will to power, the perpetual need to surpass ourselves. Those who can do it honestly without need for external forces or validation, then, are the overmen, primarily artists, philosophers, and saints. The essence of this self transcendence is the sublimation of their impulses into one focus, an artistic unity of self: "One thing is needful--giving style to one's character…in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason." "He has overcome his animal nature, organized the chaos of his passions, sublimated his impulses, and given style to his character." "The man who perfects himself and transfigures his physis [nature] achieves ultimate happiness and experiences such an overwhelming joy that he no longer feels concerned about the 'justification' of the world: he affirms it forward, backward and 'in all eternity.'" That's eternal recurrence: the man who in saying Yes! to his own being also affirms the world just as it is for all times.

So Nietzsche spoke to me big time 30 years ago. "Independence of soul! That's at stake here. No sacrifice can be too great." "The spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism." "Man can live and die in a grand style, working out his own salvation instead of relying on the sacrifice of another." I thought I was hot shit then and this heroic image grabbed me. I could thumb my nose at the universe and get along on my own, maintaining an intellectual superiority to anyone else who couldn't.

Only, I don't feel that way so much anymore. Maybe I wasn't nearly as hot shit as I thought I was. Certainly, I wasn't nearly as strong as I supposed myself to be. But, also, maybe Nietzsche didn't get it all right, either. Hard to say. But I do feel that he doesn't get it that we're all in this together. If only the "highest specimens" are able to find meaning in self overcoming, the rest of us are kinda stuck with just muddling along the best we can, trying to make sense of it all. If we say that the mass of humanity lead meaningless lives, we've just denied importance to ourselves and our fellow travelers and sufferers. When I think about what has given my life the most meaning--my love of Sara and my family, my friendships with Jim and George and Frank, my attachments to my students and athletes, it's only inadvertently about self-overcoming and more about connections. Isn't that what evolutionary psychology is telling us these days, that we are hard-wired to be deeply connected to each other?

Likewise, I'm finding the "vivesectionist" of contemporary values to be a bit of a bore. Maybe it is needful to look down on others at some point--Kaufmann says in another book that consciousness really begins on the other side of alienation--but at 62, I don't so much feel the need for that any more. When we define ourselves by what we are not, then it's really just another limitation on ourselves. Likewise, why just the artist, philosopher and saint? Why not the athlete, the teacher, the graphic designer, the computer programmer, the shoe store salesman? If we do something well, and we love it, and we seek to continually surpass ourselves at it, why shouldn't that path be open to finding meaning and transcendence in our lives? Can't we get there by chopping wood and carrying water?

So maybe Nietzsche has lost a lot of his appeal to me because I've grown old and tired and lazy and mediocre over the years. And, of course, there's the hard realization that I'm not one of the highest specimens. So be it.

I'm a little more disturbed that Kaufmann doesn't speak as deeply to me now as when I read him 20, 30, even 40 years ago. I would have put "Critique of Religion and Philosophy", "The Faith of a Heretic", and this book among the five or six most important books in my intellectual development. I've reread them all three or four times, and somehow now they don't seem as deep, as important, as they once were. I re-read "Critique" a few years back, and I didn't feel that the arguments held up as well as I previously thought. And I've kinda had the same feelings about this book. Kaufmann continually points out how Nietzsche has been misunderstood over the years, but he doesn't do quite as thorough a job of explaining Nietzsche's thought as he advertises. There were a lot of digressions in his presentation, and the book just doesn't seem as well organized as it has in the past. When I read it before, I thought that I had the final word on modern thought. Now, it just doesn't seem as convincing. That leaves me pretty bummed, really, for I feel like I've lost an old and important teacher.

Author: Kaufmann, Walter

Date Published: 1949

Length: 532 pp

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The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

So, it comes down to this: Spinoza believed that there was only one substance--make that Substance--to everything there is--all things, events, thought, everything--and everything is a mode of this substance. It can be called Substance, or it can be called Nature, or it can be called God. Therefore, mind is not separate from body, therefore there is no immortal soul--mind is really only an abstraction that the body has of itself.

"The most important feature of Spinoza's Nature--and, in a sense, the very point of his philosophy--is that it is in principle intelligible or comprehensible…there is nothing that cannot be known--even if we do not necessarily know everything."

"Spinoza claims to demonstrate once and for all that there can in fact be only one Substance in the world…everything in the world is merely a "mode" of an attribute of the Substance, or God"

(and how does he prove this? What does Spinoza take for his starting point? This crucial step is not in my highlights for the book. I wonder if I missed it or if Stewart put this in? If this is missing, then Substance becomes just another article of faith…and I don't think that Spinoza would have gone down that path. Does it follow from the determination that everything can be known? That seems to be Leibniz's jumping on point, where he found Spinoza so attractive, and so dangerous. "With a chain of definitions, axioms, and proofs…" is about the closest I can come to this. Isn't Kant's point that we cannot know how things really are?)

Leibniz sees the possible consequence to social order of this seemingly metaphysical proposition, and Stewart claims that Leibniz's mature philosophy is built on a rejection of Spinoza--namely that the universe consists of an infinite number of immortal "monads" and that the world was created and set into eternal harmony by God, who chose this universe out of an infinity of other universes as being the best that there is. Hence, Voltaire's Pangloss: this is the best of all possible worlds.

From this basic conflict, which Stewart calls "the twin founders of modern thought. We live in an age defined by its reaction to Spinoza…and there is no more compelling expression of this reaction to Spinoza…than …Leibniz." We live largely in a world of thought traced back directly through Spinoza: liberal, secular democracy, a naturalistic explanation of the growth and order of the world we see around us, and a concept of human life that is naturalistic and materialistic (vide Antonio Damasio's books: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain) Leibniz, in Stewart's explanation, stands for those forces who look to authority, especially to divine authority, to give order and meaning to life and to the universe.

The central act of the book is three days of conversation between Leibniz and Spinoza calls the defining moment of Leibniz's life and thought: the rejection of Spinoza's naturalistic explanation of everything--which Leibniz really saw as depending on Spinoza's concept of Substance.  Substance = Nature (as in natural law) = God. Unfortunately, there is no there there. There is only the sketchiest of records of the conversations themselves--some marked over notes that Leibniz made--and so what we're really left with is an act of imagination on Stewart's part of what must have taken place. Leibniz himself downplayed the importance of the conversations in trying to distance himself from Spinoza's thought, but as Stewart makes clear, Leibniz is hardly to be trusted in matters of honesty.

The books has given me the best description of Spinoza's thought and of Spinoza's importance in the history of thought. A lot of Jonathan Israel's ideas about the "radical enlightenment" now make more sense to me. The chapter of "A Secret Philosophy of the Whole of Things" is alone worth the price of the book. I still can't grasp the proposition of Spinoza's thought, but at least I can see how it came about. About Leibniz's thought, which is given equal treatment in "The Antidote to Spinozism," however, I'm not so sure. I guess that I get, in some measure, the idea of monads, but I'm not quite sure why Leibniz felt so compelled to go there. I understand the reaction to Spinoza, but I don't find his logic for the monads very compelling. But then, neither did Bertrand Russell, who called Leibniz's metaphysics "a fascinating fairy tale, coherent, perhaps, but wholly arbitrary," so I guess I'm in good company.

I suspect that Stewart gives Leibniz fairly short shrift in his descriptions of his character and motivations. Leibniz comes off as fairly shady and self deluded, so it's hard to say how much of Leibniz is a straw man who is chosen for the purpose to represent an idea--a conservative, religion idea. (the T. S. Eliot of his day--"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics.") How much of his character is caricature?

Author: Stewart, Matthew

Date Published: 2006

Length: 312 pp

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