‘What mattered most to him was writing,” says someone (his son) who knew Norman Podhoretz well, and after revisiting his tall stack of books in the weeks since he died, I don’t doubt it. The body of work he left behind is astonishing in its quality and range. The range took him from precocious essays (in his early 20s!) of wise and worldly literary criticism to fulminations on foreign policy to a long, late-life meditation on the prophets of the Hebrew Bible; the quality, sentence by sentence