One day, someone said, “This is a beat generation.” Beat as in beaten? Beat-up? Beatific? Two out of the three principals — ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Not that such viciousness was rare during Leavis’s lifetime. Not that such viciousness was rare during Leavis’s ...

In 1936, the British literary critic F.R. Leavis published a scholarly work titled "Revaluation." As an admirer of T.S. Eliot, Leavis was anxious that a review of this closely argued study of English ...

The Age of Criticism, Martin Amis once wrote, started in 1948 and ended with OPEC. That is, it started with the publication of F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition – the book that, more than any other, ...

In October 1958, I became a student of F.R. Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge. I had taken the entrance exams the previous December, including the ‘dating paper’, which involved matching passages ...