Beauty & the Beast

Keith Miller,"Western Ideas of Beauty," TLS, 16 March, reviews Umberto Eco's On Beauty: A history of a Western idea, Whitney Davis's Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud, and Robert Kiely's Blessed and Beautiful: Picturing the Saints.

Garry Wills,"Superficial & Sublime," NYRB, 7 April, reviews Hubert Dreyfus's and Sean Dorrance Kelly's All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. The finest intellectual historian of our age minces no words in his contempt for this -- at once pretentious and superficial -- book.

Paula Marantz Cohen,"A Deer in Jewelry's Headlights," Smart Set, 16 March, reviews"Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels," an exhibit at Cooper-Hewitt, the National Design Museum in Manhattan.

Jacob Heilbrunn,"Keeper of the Faith," bookforum, Feb/March, Noah Millman,"Everything Old Is Neo Again," American Conservative, 14 March, and Franklin Foer,"Ideas Rule the World," TNR, 17 March, review Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009. See also: C. Bradley Thompson,"Neoconservatism Unmasked," Cato Unbound, 7 March.

Max Boot,"The Worst," The Book, 17 March, reviews Donald Rumsfeld's Known and Unknown. Even Boot sees through this turgid apologia for a disastrous public career.