Author: Derek Turner (Derek Turner)

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Homing in on England
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Homing in on England

Michael Wood begins with a quotation from Blake: “To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”  This line betokens his aim, which is to zero in on one small English place and use its specific saga to tell the wider tale of all England from prehistory to present. The place is Kibworth, an outwardly unremarkable...

An Englishman in New York
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An Englishman in New York

The subway train clanked and screeched out of the darkness at last into stretched autumnal sunshine.  I rattled northward in an emptying carriage gazing down on nameless, nondescript streets, and sometimes straight into ex-offices within which the same endeavors had probably been carried on from when the building had been erected in the early 20th...

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Ferals and Feds

Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man, was shot dead on Thursday, August 4, by police officers in Tottenham, a largely black and impoverished suburb of northeast London.  Duggan was a member of the Star Gang, which has a reputation for carrying guns and dealing in hard drugs, and his apprehension was preplanned.  It was originally...

Bungalow Minds
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Bungalow Minds

They are cutting hay in the Haymarket.  A woman is laying out clothes to dry on the grass of Aldgate, and stags patrol where St. James’s Park will be one day, staring in puzzlement at the vast abbey protruding above the willows of Westminster.  It is London as delineated by Ralph Aggas circa 1590, reproduced...

The Robot’s Focus
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The Robot’s Focus

By the time Tony Blair stood down as prime minister to give his rival Gordon Brown the opportunity to lose office ignominiously, he had become as unpopular on the left as he had always been on the right.  A Journey is his attempt to explain himself, not so much to what he calls, alternately, “the...

The Arrhythmic Heart of England
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The Arrhythmic Heart of England

The city of Leicester is about as far from the sea as one can get in England.  But one sweltering August day, when everyone else was heading down to the beaches, we were driving in the opposite direction so that I could fill in a long-troubling gap on my mental map of England.  I had...

Sustained Magnificence
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Sustained Magnificence

Sixty-five years after the last guns ceased firing on the last Pacific atoll, Britons of all political persuasions are still wallowing in tepid World War II nostalgia. For Atlanticists, neoconservatives, and classical liberals, the war was a great Anglosphere achievement, a landmark en route to social mobility plus mercantilism.  For nationalists and romantics, there is...

Sympathetic Magic
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Sympathetic Magic

Endorsements by Christopher Hitchens and Nora Ephron do not inspire confidence in Bright-Sided.  Nor does Barbara Ehren­reich’s website, with its list of soporific-sounding previous publications, which includes Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad and Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers.  Her enumerated interests also threaten tedium—healthcare, peace,...

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The End of Strong Government?

The May 6 general election in England was one of the most eagerly contested in recent history.  At stake were 649 parliamentary seats (one vote has been postponed because of the death of a candidate) for which there were almost 4,150 candidates.  Also up for grabs were 4,222 local council seats in 164 English local...

Soulcraft as Leechcraft
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Soulcraft as Leechcraft

The photographs on the jacket of Our Times provide a pointed reminder that the British past is not just another country but another continent. The newly crowned Queen looks self-conscious yet confident in Cecil Beaton’s celebrated photograph of 1953, holding the scepter and orb of state in steady hands, her slender frame enveloped in ermine...

One For the Road
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One For the Road

In the summer of 1956, a junior transport minister activated a green traffic light in the middle of a field in Lancashire.  That was the signal for a bulldozer to flatten a hedge and start shifting soil.  In a suitably Monty Pythonesque twist, the bulldozer ran out of petrol a few seconds later. Such were...

Supernova
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Supernova

“Nobility is the symbol of mind.” —Walter Bagehot In times of texting and sexting, Twittering and wittering, there is something positively antediluvian about epistolary collections—a whiff of fountain pens and headed notepaper, morocco-topped escritoires in long-windowed drawing rooms looking out over lawns studded with cedars and peacocks.  Such fleeting evocations are lent depth and body...

A Tsunami of Towers
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A Tsunami of Towers

Here, you can see almost forever.  It is a great green plain bounded by low wolds to the west and the North Sea to the east, by the River Humber to the north and the shining mudflats of the Wash to the south.  It is a landscape for seven-league boots and ten-league thoughts, as the...

A Living Past
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A Living Past

It is a small town in Bavaria, and it is at least 32 degrees C.  The camera weighs heavy in my hands, and I can feel speckles of sweat accumulating beneath my black rucksack, as it soaks up the sun like a square and sinister sponge.  All around us are people similarly suffering, but good-tempered...

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What Civilization Remains

We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe.  I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes.  There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...

The Skeptical Mind
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The Skeptical Mind

“Skepticism is less reprehensible in inquiring years, and no crime in juvenile exercitation.” —Joseph Glanville In an intellectual climate characterized by conformity and wishful thinking, John Gray is among the most interesting and consequential thinkers contemporary Britain has to show.  From his office at the London School of Economics (where he is professor of European...

Epicene Europa
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Epicene Europa

“Roll up the map of Europe; it will not be wanted these ten years.” —William Pitt (1806) “Nothing,” goes the Johnsonian cliché, “concentrates a man’s mind more wonderfully than the prospect of being hanged.”  This very natural reaction may explain why a whole raft of intellectuals, journalists, and even politicians, none of whom was previously...

A Humble Love
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A Humble Love

“Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.” —Friedrich von Hardenberg John Betjeman’s evocative and educative television programs and his uniquely readable poetry have left an indelible image in the British public mind—of a jolly, witty, and eccentric man, ambling around Britain’s cities and countryside, pointing out hitherto unnoticed details of hitherto underappreciated buildings...

The Decivilizing Century
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The Decivilizing Century

When I contacted Transaction to request a review copy of the paperback edition of The Strange Death of Moral Britain (the hardback appeared in 2004), I was told I would have to wait for a few weeks, because they were completely out of stock of the first print run.  Perhaps this book has struck a...

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A Great Tradition Renewed

Literary feuds, like ideas, have consequences.  After Sir Walter Scott read a disparaging review of his Marmion in the Edinburgh Review, the bard of the Borders decided that what British life needed above all was a journal that would give his works more respectful treatment and would provide a powerful antidote to the Whiggish and...

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Le Pen’s Loose Langue

In late February, the presidential candidate of France’s Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, received widespread press coverage for saying, in an interview with La Croix, that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was merely “an incident,” adding that the 3,000 who died should be seen in the context of...

Theseus in the Moral Maze
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Theseus in the Moral Maze

Roger Scruton has had a long and paradoxical career as a kind of intellectual outlaw—a sage of the badlands that hem in the p.c. pale.  Aesthete, philosopher, author, journalist, lecturer, broadcaster, farmer, fox hunter, even musician—he has been all of these things, an often solitary small-c conservative voice in milieux dominated by the forces of...

Fictional Muslims, Nonfictional Muslims
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Fictional Muslims, Nonfictional Muslims

Ninety-two years ago, at the apex of England’s Edwardian ease, Gilbert Keith Chesterton published a curious little novel, written in his inimitable light-but-serious style.  In the context of a literary ambience that had recently produced The Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan, The Flying Inn must have seemed like just another piece of whimsy,...

Our Special Relationship
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Our Special Relationship

Con Coughlin is the defense and security editor of London’s Daily Telegraph and the author of several books on Middle Eastern themes: Hostage, about Lebanon in the 1980’s; A Golden Basin Full of Scorpions: The Quest for Modern Jerusalem, a presentation of the city through the voices of residents; and Saddam: King of Terror, a...

The Reign of Grantham
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The Reign of Grantham

“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley Media commentators covering David Cameron’s incumbency as Tory leader have remarked—often gleefully—on how unpopular Cameron’s Labour-like policies are with the “traditional right.”  By this, they mean the Thatcherite rump of the party (probably still the numerical...

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Anti-Colonist Ally

India, during the Cold War, was officially nonaligned.  She was closer to the Soviet Union, which saw her as a natural “anti-colonialist” ally and also wanted a regional counterbalance for China—and accordingly assisted India militarily and politically, especially during U.N. debates over the Kashmir conflict.  Later, in 1998, India’s continued refusal to sign the 1970...

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Irreducible India

When Vasco da Gama’s three battered little ships dropped anchor off Calicut on May 20, 1498, after a voyage of over ten months, they had finally found the sea route between Europe and India so long sought by Portugal’s kings and explorers. Apart from the desire for knowledge, Da Gama’s tatterdemalion mini-armada had come for...

Tremendous Twaddle
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Tremendous Twaddle

There was a time, not long ago, when Britons just laughed at political correctness, seeing it as a Californian cult that no one with any common sense could ever take seriously. Even now, one comes across Conservative politicians who will say that such and such a news story is evidence of “political correctness gone mad”—as...

Britain’s Liberal Legacy
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Britain’s Liberal Legacy

One can easily imagine meeting David Conway in the company of Adam Smith or David Hume—an historical conceit that would please him.  A quietly spoken, formidably intelligent philosophy professor, he is a senior research fellow at Civitas, the think tank that grew out of the Institute for Economic Affairs—and a very agreeable lunch companion, as...

I’m Just a Travelin’ Man
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I’m Just a Travelin’ Man

“Education begins with life,” said Benjamin Franklin somewhere.  That was how it always seemed to me when I was growing up in Southern Ireland in the 1970’s and 80’s. I enjoyed some things about school, especially my secondary school—an experimental comprehensive, one of only two in the country at that time, opened to cater to...

The Party Pooper
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The Party Pooper

Keith Sutherland is a respected British publisher of such works as History of Political Thought and Polis: The Journal of Greek Political Thought, as well as the executive editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.  He has also edited such important collections of essays as The Rape of the Constitution? (2000)—of which compendium Margaret Thatcher...

An Afternoon Man
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An Afternoon Man

Anthony Powell has been variously called “the English Proust” and “a master of wit, paradox and social delineation”; Kingsley Amis said, “I would rather read Mr. Powell than any English novelist now writing.”  He was an admired contemporary, friend, or patron of such important 20th-century figures as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell,...

Themselves Alone
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Themselves Alone

“Our sympathy,” said Gibbon with his usual acuity, “is cold to the relation of distant misery.”  You do not need to know very much about human nature to agree with the great historiographer that it is often very difficult, or even impossible, to sympathize with the woes of strangers. And if it is difficult to...

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Postwar Immigration

The British National Party (BNP), founded in 1982 by John Tyndall, a former chairman of the National Front, has consistently campaigned to reverse postwar immigration, to withdraw Britain from the European Union, to reintroduce the death penalty for serious crimes, to back Ulster’s Loyalists, to support the family, and to place greater restraints on big...

Ghosts on the Stairs
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Ghosts on the Stairs

“F–k socialism!” —Evelyn Waugh Octogenarian knight Sir Peregrine Worsthorne is famous in Britain for several things.  He was the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and a political columnist for that paper for 30 years.  He is married to the jolly Lucinda Lambton, who presents enjoyable, occasional TV programs on heritage-related topics.  He wears pink bowties. ...

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The New White Moors

On February 22, an article in London’s Sunday Times reported on a survey of white British converts to Islam.  The survey was conducted by Yahya (formerly Jonathan) Birt, the son of former BBC director-general Sir John Birt.  Having examined the 2001 census figures, Birt concluded that there were around 14,200 white converts to Islam in...

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The End of the Affair?

At 6:07 A.M. on May 29, 2003, in a BBC Radio broadcast, reporter Andrew Gilligan commented on mounting criticism of the Blair government’s rationale for going to war against Iraq.  Citing an anonymous “official” involved in the preparation of the Joint Intelligence Committee dossier used to justify the military campaign, Gilligan said that [The dossier]...

Voyage to Albion
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Voyage to Albion

Englishness may be coming back into fashion.  After the union of the English and Scottish crowns and the foundation of modern Britain in 1603, the idea of Englishness was increasingly submerged in, and confused with, the idea of Britishness.  It now looks as if the English may be becoming self-conscious again.  Three centuries of outward-looking...

The Great All-in-Agreement Debate
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The Great All-in-Agreement Debate

“Debate is masculine; conversation is feminine.” —A. Bronson Alcott For decades, a massive problem has been aborning in all Western countries: the increasingly difficult-to-ignore presence of ever-growing and restive ethnic minority groups alienated from the majority communities surrounding them.  These disparate groups—emboldened by our enervation and in thrall to ethnocentric demagogues masquerading as “antiracists” and...

Style in History
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Style in History

“An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson  Hitler & Churchill—Secrets of Leadership is made from Andrew Roberts’ recent BBC television series, Secrets of Leadership, in which he sought to tease out the management secrets of four famous charismatic leaders—Hitler, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Ken-nedy. With this...

The Fate of Britain
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The Fate of Britain

“The day of small nations has passed away; the day of empires has come.” —Joseph Chamberlain Simon Schama is university professor of art history and history at Columbia University and the author of histories and art histories, such as his 1995 Landscape and Memory and his two works on Dutch art and culture, An Embarrassment...

Politics and Power
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Politics and Power

“A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in it; not dead, chopping barren logic merely.” —Thomas Carlyle Since September 11, 2001, there have been many articles and several books purporting to explain what led up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Intelligence and military analyses,...

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On Being a Pariah

In summer and autumn 2001, as Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Portillo, Kenneth Clarke, Michael Ancram, and David Davis slugged it out to see who would become the new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, colorful stories began circulating about Duncan Smith, who was widely regarded as the right’s great white hope. An ex-Army officer and the...

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A London Political Bestiary

From the West End, to the Square Mile, out into the most featureless South London suburbs, London is full of political resonances and the memories of old controversies.  From all kinds of streets, roads, avenues, broadways, high streets, rises, hills, crescents, parks, mews, and terraces, native or adoptive Londoners have gone out into the world...

Clark’s Tale
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Clark’s Tale

Alan Clark, who died in 1999 at the age of 71, was one of the Conservative Party’s most iconoclastic, amusing, and controversial—yet thoughtful—figures. In a party top-heavy with temporizers and economic reductionists, in an age full of angst, his cheerful disregard for delicate sensibilities was a joy to behold, even when you did not agree...

Waking Up to Dumbing Down
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Waking Up to Dumbing Down

Chronicles readers may be rather tired of hearing about “dumbing down,” but the ugly term is just now starting to attain cliché status in Britain. Conservative newspapers like the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have begun to talk about dumbing down recently, in reporting, for example, that almost 200,000 children entering British secondary schools (11-...

English Tracts
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English Tracts

        “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.” —William Cowper, The Task, II For the last 300 years, “England” and “Britain” have been largely synonymous. When Glasgow-born General Sir John Moore lay dying at Corunna, his last words were “I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope...

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Letter From London

Tony Blair’s regime manages to be simultaneously comic and tragic, with a slight tilt toward tragedy. The government is made up of chinless Christian Socialists, Anglophobe Scots, aggrieved proletarians, shrewish women, and militant homosexuals—most of whom seem to detest each other. The members of the Cabinet all have grandiose schemes, which tend toward unfeasibility and...

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Blair’s War on Biology

In the May 2000 issue of Chronicles (“Letter From England: New Gaybour”), I wrote that there was a good chance that Section 28 (the portion of the 1988 United Kingdom Local Government Bill that forbids the promotion of homosexuality among schoolchildren) would be retained through the current Parliament at least, because of the Labour Party’s...

Simple Pleasures
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Simple Pleasures

From 1957 to 1990, Michael Wharton, under the pen name of “Peter Simple,” was partly or solely responsible for writing the Daily Telegraph‘s famous “Way of the World” column. Now well into his 80’s, he continues to write in the same paper under the name of Marryat’s hero, though Telegraph readers are rationed to just...