Hmm …

… What Lasts? | Books and Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Kimball's passion for this mediation is evidently running up against the crisis in political conservatism. The Left-Right deadlock has given rise to Doublespeak dogma, decrees of anathema, and shunnings on the Right that are as harsh and immobilizing as any political correctness of the Left has been. Kimball did not feel free, in this book about transcendent durability, to omit complaints—such as one about judicial activism of the Left alone—that will likely not appear in the durability column during the next few hundred years; and he makes these complaints in a style very different from that of his essays on Kipling, Chesterton, John Buchan, and A Dangerous Book for Boys, essays where even-handedness and humor lend an attractive rhythm to his strictures and may allow Kimball's own prose, like that of his subjects, to survive on the sheer strength of its beauty and insight as a preferred record of its time.