The American Spectator

Later in his career he developed one of the game’s great jump shots, 
which he released high in the air and fading away — a thing of beauty and a joy, if not forever, then till the next time he did it.

On the self-centered Gore Vidal (before he passed):

If his standing in the view of the world is not so high as he might 
like, in his own view it is very high indeed. Self-love in him does not go unrequited.

Epstein’s beat, in all his work, is the Vanity Fair we call life. He’s the amused observer, though hardly the detached ironist. He has no political agenda, at least none that he flogs in his writing, which mostly ignores the daily drudge of partisan politics. But he is deeply distrustful of Big Ideas. If, as I believe to be the case, conservatism is a state of mind rather than a set of specific programs, then Epstein is one of ours. He deals with the world as it is, and usually gives the back of his (literary) hand to those who would control us to improve us. He demonstrates this in his summing up of Santayana:

The Santayana one finally admires is the writer who cuts through the nonsense to get straight at the truth of things, the Santayana who is a free-thinker 
 and skeptic. This is the Santayana who remarks that “reformers do not like one another,” and that “humanitarians have an intense hatred of mankind as it is,”
which is of course why they are always so hard at work trying to change it.

Joseph Epstein goes straight for the truth of things, in the most agreeable and readable way. Which is why I lift up Essays in Biography, and all of Epstein’s work, most of which is still in print, to TAS readers.