Against the pressure critics face these days to report on box-office grosses or crank out quick, silly punditry on the state of the culture, he defends the honor of the passionate mind.
LAUREN FLANIGAN -- For Valentine's Day, with typical flair, the New York City Opera diva sings a recital called "Passionate Minds: Women Who Write About Love".
For the occasion she put together a program called "Passionate Minds: Women Write About Love": songs by female composers, ranging from the 19th century (Clara Schumann and Pauline Viardot) to today (Deborah Drattell and Tania Leon).
As for philosopher-historians like Vico, Herder, and Spengler, Barzun held that they did not, despite creating prodigious works of learning, write histories at all: "It is not a paradox to say that in seeking a law of history those passionate minds were giving up their interest in history".
Claudia Roth Pierpont, in a New Yorker piece since collected in her book Passionate Minds, described Nin as "the wife of a banker, a woman known for her literary aspirations", and "Madame Bovary sitting down with a pen and the notion: 'Flaubert, c'est moi'".
A collection of eleven of Pierpont's New Yorker essays, "Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World," was published in 2000.
· David Bodanis is the author of Passionate Minds: The Great Enlightenment Love Affair, just published by Little, Brown.
The women writers featured in "Passionate Minds" range from Gertrude Stein to Mae West, from Anas Nin to Ayn Rand, yet their biographies add up to a surprisingly unified book.
"But it's difficult to do that when you're in a passionate frame of mind".
