Category: Correspondence

Seen from certain angles, Dover Castle looks like the most formidable fortress in the world.  Far below, the English Channel is a vision in ozone and aquamarine—the deeps dotted with shipping, the Pas-de-Calais shimmering with memories, the chalky cliffs ant-tunneled with ancient emplacements, a pristine Cross of St. George snapping in the breeze from the...

Migration is a reality that concerns no more than 200 million people on earth now living outside their country of origin—that is, only three percent of the world’s population.  Why should we even talk about it?  The reason is simple: Global statistics are worthless; the whole phenomenon is concentrated in Europe and the United States. ...

Immanentizing the eschaton via Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy has achieved his long-sought goal—namely, to be to 21st-century America what Bonaparte was to 19th-century Europe.  In respectable quarters Justice Kennedy is considered a world-historical personage, having made the oxymoron “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. Several years ago, in a letter to the...

“Oh, the wild hills of Wales, the land of old renown, and of wonder . . . ”         —George Borrow, Wild Wales I step silent across the flagged floor below weathered slates and beams, sleep-held family breathing behind, the only other sounds the scratching of terriers’ claws as they push past...

When Metternich famously dismissed Italy as “a geographical expression,” the peninsula was divided into states ruled by (to name only the principals) Austrians, the Vatican, and Spanish Bourbons.  Yet even 150 years after the Kingdom of Piedmont united Italy by conquest, the truth of Metternich’s description remains perceptible to anyone who travels from Torino to...

During the last few months in Britain there have been yet more revelations of new Muslim crimes and detailed confirmations of older ones. In 2014 Lutfur Rahman, a Muslim, was elected for a second term as the mayor of Tower Hamlets, a London borough where one third of the population is Muslim.  This April a...

        “How shall we sing the Lord’s songin a strange land?” —Psalm 137:4        “[Man] has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.  The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.  It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,...

In America today, we seem to face two alternatives: accepting hordes of invaders with alien cultures and ideologies, who are unwilling to assimilate and whose presence endangers the vestiges of our civilization; or homogenizing America into a rootless, soulless melting pot—a “proposition nation” without a past or local or family customs. Families and learning matter. ...

American Sniper has generated more commentary, both scathingly critical and laudatory, than any film in recent memory.  The story of “America’s deadliest sniper,” Texas-born and -bred Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (credited with more than 160 “confirmed” kills), himself shot down in 2013 by a disturbed war veteran he was trying to help, has become a...

Early in Owen Wister’s 1905 novel Lady Baltimore, the narrator, recently arrived in Charleston from Philadelphia, remarks upon the stillness of the city, its “silent verandas” and cloistered gardens behind their wrought iron gates—“this little city of oblivion . . . with its lavender and pressed shut memories . . . ”  For Wister the...

Forty years is a long enough stretch, but it seems far less than half a lifetime ago when, as a surly British teenager, I found myself clutching an all-day pass to the 1974 World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington.  I was there on my summer vacation from Cambridge, and it seemed to me an almost satirically...

The stone head from the Iron Age glowers out of its glass case as if outraged by the indignity of imprisonment, its relegation from totem to tourist attraction.  Not that there are ever many tourists in Doncaster Museum, especially on a unseasonably warm day when the sun-punished town seems full of the grit and stink...

There has been for years a growing clamor in the United States demanding a “normalization” of economic and diplomatic relations with Cuba.  But the sources of the clamor have become more varied, as have their motivations.  At first there were only the lefties, fans of the “real socialism” supposedly found in the Marxist-Leninist paradise of...

I’ve long wanted to go to Cuba for the same reason that most Americans my age might.  I wanted to see a place that has, for most of my life, been shrouded in mystery.  It has been difficult for me to accept the idea that a country only 90 miles off our coast, home to...

“We don’t divorce our men; we bury them,” instructs Stella Bernard, played by a loony Ruth Gordon, in Lord Love a Duck (1966).  That’s certainly better social policy than America has pursued since 1970, with no-fault divorce shattering families.  No custody battles.  No brawls over alimony and child support.  No kids shuttled back and forth...

Drowned drumlins swarmed in the brilliant bay, and ravens like those that plagued Saint Patrick croaked from the chasm below my feet as they rolled lazily half a mile above County Mayo.  The ravens’ harsh call was an onomatopoeic reminder of my present eminence, Croagh Patrick, the 2,510-foot cone that dominates the great inlet of...

Viviane Reding is a woman on a mission.  She believes Europe’s major companies are run by an old boys’ network that excludes female colleagues from top jobs.  And since Reding is the E.U. commissioner for justice, fundamental rights, and citizenship, she is in a position to do something about it.  She has proposed a quota...

Now, I’m a poor Oakie and I’m heading out west. I’m pulling a long trailer and my car’s doing its best. We hit a long mountain and she began to boil. She blew a head gasket and it started dripping oil. The wheels is out of balance, she shimmies and she shakes. But it keeps...

A nine-year-old boy has caused the simmering tension between Western Europeans and Muslim immigrants to boil over once again.  This latest incident has occurred in the Netherlands, which over the past decade has become the poster child for failed Muslim integration. A boy named Yunus, born in the Netherlands to Turkish-Muslim immigrant parents, lives in...

While some communities—such as Portland, Oregon, and Birmingham, Alabama—report making progress toward police and community mental-health cooperation to reduce incidents of deadly violence, the complexities of aberrant behavior will continue to vex us until citizens and public officials are willing to intervene to prevent the violence.  That is especially true when evidence clearly demonstrates that...

Margaret Thatcher enjoyed being who she was.  She did not think of this inner bounce as a gift of fortune but as a virtue, as obligatory self-respect.  She was a patriot and a Tory in that way.  The party was her milieu—the people whose self-respect resembled her own and supported it.  The country, too, was...

Something strange is haunting our dreams these days. The teenage cashier at the grocery store is conversing with a customer in front of my sister.  “That’s right,” she says.  “The only thing that will work now is for civilization to collapse so we can all go back to nature.” The next day I encounter a...

The fall the Orioles won their first World Series, I was rooming off-campus with three other Towson State College freshmen in a three-story house on Evesham Avenue.  The Baltimore of the mid-1960’s was not as much ashamed of its heritage as unschooled in it, most Baltimoreans not knowing—or caring—that, under the shade of the trees...

My father, Sefton Sandford, died last November 11, which somehow appropriately was Veterans Day.  He was 87.  Any child’s judgment is apt to be subjective on these occasions, but I remain stubbornly of the opinion that he was a great man, and certainly one who answered Wordsworth’s question, “Who is the happy warrior?  Who is...

My dear Hobson, The bleak tone of your email has distressed me.  You report waking on the morning of November 7 convinced that a vast majority of politicians—Republicans and Democrats—are certifiable lunatics.  According to your somewhat incoherent letter—were you inebriated, or are all those sentence fragments and dangling prepositions the dismal product of your recently...

The small neo-Gothic chapel in the confines of St. John’s cemetery in the New York City borough of Queens was filling up quickly on that brisk autumn Sunday.  The cemetery itself is something of a New York landmark—a resting place for the heroes and villains of its turbulent past.  The modest tombstones of firefighters killed...

Moscow, so the film title went, does not believe in tears, and stories of massacres by criminal gangs who control major enterprises, contract killings over business and political disputes, and savagely beat or kill journalists who don’t recognize the limits of Russian press freedom still pop up in today’s “middle class” Russia, where this sort...

Sacré Coeur (Sacred Heart) Basilica draws your eyes from every point in Paris.  The white Romano-Byzantine domes of this marvelous church dominate the skyline of the grittier neighborhoods of northern Paris.  Observed from atop the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré Coeur’s domes seem to levitate above Paris. I decided to save Sacré Coeur for my last...

In his essay entitled “The Call to Service,” John Erskine posed these questions: Do you look on the unfortunate as your brothers, in temporary distress, or do you see in them objects of charity?  Do you think your function is to serve, and their function is to be served?  If by a miracle they should...