KYLE SMITH: The Permanent War for Culture.

The late and much-feared New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer was once seated next to Woody Allen at a dinner. Allen asked whether Kramer ever felt embarrassed when he encountered in social settings artists whose work he had disparaged in print. No, said Kramer. Why should he be embarrassed? They made the bad art. He merely described it. It occurred to the critic after the party had concluded that he had once published an adverse review of a Allen movie, The Front.

Forty years ago, Kramer founded The New Criterion, which was taken over in his declining years by Roger Kimball, who supplies the anecdote above in a marvelous chrestomathy, The Critical Temper: Interventions from The New Criterion at 40, a volume that brings together some of the funniest, most cutting, most perceptive, and most appreciative pieces published in that august, sometimes Augustan, journal over the past decade. Kramer and Kimball’s monthly magazine of arts, culture, and media has far outlasted its honored ancestor The Criterion, T. S. Eliot’s publication, which dissolved on the eve of World War II after 17 years of contrarian and conservative rebuke to its era’s prevailing cultural dogmas.

With his dry wit, his sesquipedalian playfulness, his deep learning, and his dapper sangfroid, Kimball is perhaps our closest living heir to his friend William F. Buckley Jr. As Bill did, Roger retains a certain boyish (or even impish) aspect well into middle age, along with a never-slackening thirst to charge back into the fray, no matter how outnumbered his side. Roger enjoys quoting Hamlet’s injunction “to find quarrel in a straw when honor’s at the stake.”

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