Russell Kirk authored thirty-two books on political theory, the history of ideas, education, cultural criticism, and supernatural tales. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 landmark book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”
A friend of mine has the misfortune of owning a number of stone cottages. I say “misfortune” because the cottages are in Scotland, and their rents are fixed at the level of 1914. The cottages were built long before 1914–some of them are eighteenth-century work, with their pantiled roofs and thick rubble walls and irregular…
