Bile From the Literary Right

The first oddity about Kenneth Lynn’s book of once-published pieces is its title. True, the locomotive on the dust jacket gives away what kind of line is an air-line, but who would have guessed that this particular railroad passed through Cambridge on its ineluctable way west—or at least did so in 1900, when the Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana delivered himself one October evening before the student Signet Club of a satiric poem joyfully mocking the smug gentility of...