Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

This week on nybooks.com: The Romneys, father and son, the virtuosity of Liszt, the problem of income inequality, the euro crisis, Margaret Thatcher, William Carlos Williams, and Edward Burne-Jones. Plus, on the NYRblog, excerpts from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, change in Italy, and Sherlock Holmes.
The 2012 Campaign Willard Mitt Romney Michael Tomasky Romney seems in certain ways a fine and even rare person. He is diligent, industrious, and appears to be honest. He is a man of apparently deep personal virtue, generous with his money and time. But with all that, there still seems something missing in the man.
Music The Super Power of Franz Liszt Charles Rosen He was the first composer who turned a musical performance into something like an athletic feat.
Art Aesthetic, Erotic Burne-Jones Richard Dorment There wasn’t much the Victorian public objected to in art as long as the artist behaved with a modicum of discretion. Public scandal, though, was a serious business.
The Debt Crisis For Europe: ‘The Firepower Is There’ An interview with Klaus Regling The head of the European Financial Stability Facility on financial reform efforts, leveraging options, and S&P’s downgrade of the eurozone countries.
		Live your life as though you were already dead, Che Guevara declared. Okay, let’s see how that works. Not much difference as far as I can see, the earth the same Paradise It’s always wanted to be, Heaven as far away as before... —Charles Wright, Shadow and Smoke
Poetry The New World of William Carlos Williams Adam Kirsch Why is it that almost fifty years after his death, the reputation of William Carlos Williams still seems to be haunted by a ghost of uncertainty?
Film Daddy’s Girl Julian Barnes Meryl Streep’s Mrs. Thatcher is eerily watchable and aurally exact. “Weak! Weak! Weak!” she cries, and all quail before her, not just male Tory ministers but probably some of the audience as well.
The Economy We’re More Unequal Than You Think Andrew Hacker Imagine a giant vacuum cleaner looming over America’s economy, drawing dollars from its bottom to its upper tiers.
Geopolitics The Chinese Are Coming! Richard Bernstein In A Contest for Supremacy, Aaron Friedberg provides the most informed, cogent, and well-developed warning of the Chinese threat that I have seen.
Also in our February 23 issue Elizabeth Drew on money in politics, R.J.W. Evans on Bismarck, George Soros on how to save the euro, Colm Tóibín on Edmund White, Richard Lewontin on DNA in criminal prosecutions, Jonathan Freedland in Hebron, Charles Simic on the New Hampshire primary, and more.
Robert Walser: Berlin and the Artist	Michael Dirda: Sherlock Lives!	Tim Parks: Can Italy Change?