The Wind from America, 1778-1781, by Claude Manceron (New York: Simon & Schuster; 584 pp.) In this second volume of the Age of the French Revolution series, first published in 1978, Manceron explores the influence on Europe of both
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The Wind from America, 1778-1781, by Claude Manceron (New York: Simon & Schuster; 584 pp.) In this second volume of the Age of the French Revolution series, first published in 1978, Manceron explores the influence on Europe of both
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Here at the beginning of the May issue, I am pleased to introduce a new feature, In This Number, which will henceforth introduce each new issue of Chronicles. And in this inaugural notice, I’m pleased to announce also
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Pro-democratic ideological think tanks that evaluate the future of democracy by the extent of its global spread and the fortunes of relatively insignificant countries around the world (the Third one, especially) should be far more concerned with events currently occurring
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The wind roared all night, darkness in furious motion that yet held solidly in place. It was still gusting hard when Harlan Edmonds’ Dodge pickup pulled into the drive beside the house at ten in the morning and stopped behind
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Always keen to read travel books about Mexico, I picked up an elderly copy (printed by A. Appleton & Company in 1921) of Viva Mexico! by Charles Macomb Flandrau that I came across in a local bookshop. The book, originally
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Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, by Christophe Guilluy (New Haven: Yale University Press; 184 pp., $25.00). The French dislike what they call “Anglo-American economics” even more than they dislike English and American cookery;
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Stephen Bodio is a memoirist, journalist, critic, sportswriter, naturalist, outdoorsman, hunter, falconer, bird breeder, dog breeder, and now a novelist. Born in Boston, he has lived in the dusty roadside hamlet of Magdalena in southwestern New Mexico for more than
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How can I be Me? Let Me count the ways . . .
In 1976 New York published a lengthy essay, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” by the reporter and novelist Tom Wolfe, who died last year,
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When I was in my middle teens I read all or most of Sinclair Lewis’s work. It seems impossible, but it is a fact nevertheless that Main Street will be a century old next year, and Babbitt in 2022. I
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The Case for Trump, by Victor Davis Hanson (New York: Basic Books; 400 pp., $23.99). It is expected of an author that he say something new and big about someone or something new and big, even should it have
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Washington never made any particular secret of its jaundiced view of Brexit as suggested succinctly by President Obama when he warned that Great Britain, if she voted to leave the European Union, would need to go to “the back of
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The March issue of Chronicles coincides with the 30th anniversary of the passing of novelist, essayist, poet, and conservationist Edward Abbey. This column appears as a chapter in The Hundredth Meridian: Seasons and Travels in the New Old West (Chronicles
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It seems that a part of Donald Trump’s base—the part that writes and otherwise comments on him, anyway—is angry with the President for having reopened the portions of the federal government he had shut down for 35 days after failing
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Dr. Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, aetat. 59, is under enormous pressure to resign his position after a conservative website revealed the fact that his page in his medical school yearbook from 1984 carries a photograph of
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I’m rereading large portions of Ed Abbey’s books (of course) as Chronicles goes to press: Desert Solitaire, Black Sun and The Fool’s Progress (both novels), Abbey’s Road, One Life at a Time, Please, Down the River,
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The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, by Zachary Leader (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 784 pp., $40.00). This is the second volume of the author’s biography of Saul Bellow, a massive and no doubt definitive work,
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Throughout the Introduction and into the first chapter of Ship of Fools you seem to be seated before a television screen listening to, and watching, Tucker Carlson in his nightly broadcast. The voice is the same, the tone is the
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De Gaulle, by Julian Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard; 928 pp., $39.95). Here is no doubt the best, most comprehensive, most politically balanced and appropriately distanced of the now four notable biographies of Charles de Gaulle. Previously, those
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In its issue for December 20, 2018, the New York Review of Books published an essay by Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, titled “Two Roads for the New French Right.” The piece caught the attention of many American
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Because of the Internet, old-fashioned travel agents are nearly as obsolete as ocean-going passenger liners. In their place a new sort of agent is arising: the migrant or asylum agent, formerly known as the people smuggler. The phenomenon has
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Dining out with my wife in a restaurant in Paris recently, I became aware of the well-dressed Frenchman seated with his wife two tables away from us listening in on our conversation. The table for two between us was unoccupied.
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When one is tired of London, said Dr. Johnson, one is tired of life. I spent a week in London last November, a city I have visited many times and know well having lived a year there with my
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Immediately after Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France in May 2017, progressive Americans fairly swooned with envy. If only they could have a president like M. Macron: young, handsome, progressive, cosmopolitan, polished, globally minded and dedicated to the European
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The left can nearly always be relied upon to recognize a new and unprecedented situation when it arises, and to propose that it be met resolutely and “creatively,” as it likes to say. The exceptions come when holding fast to
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I expected something quite different than I got when I began reading As A City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon, by Daniel T. Rodgers and just released by Basic Books. I am not
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The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics, by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler (New York: Basic Books; 448 pp., $32.00). Andrew Jackson ran for President in 1824 and was defeated by
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“You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein is said to have told Ernest Hemingway when he and his first wife were living in Paris after the Great War. Since then, the generation that was born in the 1890’s and
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A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera, by Vivien Schweit-zer (New York: Basic Books; 288 pp., $27.00). I need to be fair to this book, because the author, a concert pianist and writer who worked for a decade as
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Seeking relief from the midterm madness, I’ve been rereading H.L. Mencken’s political reportage and commentary, selections from which have been published in most Mencken anthologies. Up to Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for a second presidential term, American politics was still enjoyable—bitter
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In Europe some time during the 17th and 18th centuries the class of people who were known after 1789 as “the left” made the shocking discovery that the world is not perfect: not even all it might be but should
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Hours after the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Judge Kavanaugh as the 114th Supreme Court Justice, a commentator on FOX News remarked that no winners had emerged from the legislative ordeal. He was wrong, of course. Kavanaugh himself was the
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Not only is Father Rutler one of the most brilliant priests in the country; he is also one of the finest writers of the English language today. In this collection of predominantly short essays, many or most of them reprinted
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As a means to a brief escape from the (so far) miserable 21st century I picked up and began reading The Reason Why, an excellent work of nonacademic history published in 1953 by Cecil Woodham-Smith (in England, the sexes
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Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was one of the most important philosophers and authors of the 20th century. Camus called him, “after Nietzsche, . . . perhaps the greatest ‘European writer.’” Yet he is virtually unknown today, and scarcely ever read,
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The author is chief executive of Humanists UK, president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and a former director of the European Humanist Foundation. He describes his book as “not intended as an argument for secularism but as an
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Of all the epithets Donald Trump has delivered over the last 24 months (“Mexican immigrant thieves and rapists,” “shithole countries,” the “Mueller Witch Hunt,” etc.), none has provoked greater outrage on the part of liberals than his characterization of
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It used to be said of the Anglican Church that it was “the Tory Party at prayer.” On the occasion of Sen. John McCain’s funeral service in Washington National Cathedral last September 1, the United States and the world were
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As of the start of September, it seemed no week was complete without another scandal breaking within the Church of Rome, considered by Her members to be the Mystical Body of Christ. These scandals, as even the Congolese pygmies
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In 1935, as president of France, Pierre Laval banned “weapons of war” and decreed that all firearms should be registered with the government. In 1945 he was tried and found guilty of treason for his collaboration with the German
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It’s easy in this business to read too much journalism at the expense of books. Every morning I go through the New York Times (faster and more selectively with each week that passes), the (London) Daily Telegraph, and Le
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A book faces me across the room from a bookcase in my office. It has a blood-red and black cover. The author’s name is printed in black down the upper part of the spine and the title in white below
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The political establishment in California has become self-admittedly secessionist in recent months, rebelling specifically against federal immigration policy and more broadly by raising the possibility of leaving a backward and reactionary country that does not share its culture and its
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My wife and I shall visit Paris again this fall, as we have done for years, but the city will be an empty place for us following the death of our dear friend and my revered colleague, Claude Polin, on
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“The conscience of the Senate”: Senator Jeff Flake (R-Az) on Senator John (“Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb bomb-bomb Iran”) McCain.
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Women in Combat: Unnatural, Foolish, Immoral, by Mark C. Atkins (Cottage Grove, TN: Gildersleeve Publications; 212 pp., $10.99). Mark Atkins describes himself as a “failed Marine” who has never been in combat and who writes “with the same authority
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When the review copy of A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, by Alistair Horne, hit my desk at National Review in 1977, I found a reviewer immediately and waited for a second copy to follow from the publisher
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“Never lose your temper except on purpose” was a firm maxim of Dwight Eisenhower’s. Donald Trump seems generally to observe the same rule, though certainly not always.
His critics failed to understand this during the primaries in 2016, and they
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The Referendum that took Great Britain out of the European Union by a large popular majority occurred two years ago. President Trump was elected two years ago this coming November in something like a landslide in the Electoral College. Marine
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Chronicles and The Rockford Institute have sustained a dreadful personal and institutional loss with the death of our dear friend and irreplaceable contributor Claude Polin, who died early on the morning of July 23 at his flat in Paris in
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With the sole exception of his unfortunate misstep during his joint news conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki when he seemed to take Putin’s word over American intelligence regarding the Kremlin’s interference in the American elections two years ago, President
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