Nock left these luminous pages in their pristine form of lectures. That form shows him off at his best: full of charm, candid in his prejudices, elegant in diction, a natural ironist, and a man in whom thinking is a familiar exercise.
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun (1907–) is a French-born American historian of ideas and culture. He attended Columbia University and later taught there. For years, he and literary critic Lionel Trilling, ran Columbia’s famous Great Books course. Jacques Barzun has continued to write on education and cultural history since retiring from Columbia. At 84 years of age, he began writing his 800-page From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present.
