The elegantly titled Iron Wall is a perfect example of how a necessary book on an important topic can be rendered inadequate by the author’s all-consuming bias. In the Preface to this immense volume, Avi Shlaim, a retired professor at Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy, describes his well-connected family as Iraqi “Arab”...
Having access to personal correspondence and other private papers is every biographer’s dream, a potential difference between a decent biography and a great biography. In the case of Russell Kirk, the advantage was huge. Kirk maintained a “massive—in some ways, beyond comprehension—correspondence” over the course of a prolific life in letters. For example, Bradley Birzer,...
A distinguished and liberal economic historian, Prof. Michael Hudson has laid bare the secret of the present American dilemma—why we suffer a declining and artificial economy and a widening chasm between the rich and the rest. The interest-collecting rich absorb ever more of the national income. “Instead of creating a mutually beneficial symbiosis with the...
“Conservatives engage in rebellions, not revolutions.” How true, and what a way to begin a book. The Conservative Rebellion is part memoir, part intellectual and political history by a scholar who came of age in the revolutionary 1960’s, when fashionable people viewed rebels as Parliament viewed the Boston Minutemen. (King George III, however, considered George...
The varied and complex relations between religion and power can be understood only by means of extensive comparisons, between nations and across time. Who better to demonstrate this than Prof. David Martin, the doyen of the comparative sociology of religion? Martin’s first achievement is to refute “the general theory of secularisation,” which has enjoyed so...
The 21st century has not so far been a happy time for American conservatives. It began with an appalling terrorist attack whose key perpetrators had taken advantage of our government’s insouciance toward mass immigration from the Third World. Instead of reversing the trend toward demographic transformation, the authorities doubled down on it: We now accept...
Until the late 1950’s and early 60’s, the deal for government employees was that they were paid less than similar private-sector workers but got excellent benefits, especially strong pensions and almost absolute job security. And although some government workers belonged to associations, they did not have collective-bargaining rights. The deal was a fairly good one. ...
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) is considered to be among the most important American poets of the 20th century. She was a U.S. Poet Laureate and won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and the Neustadt International Prize. Her collection Questions of Travel (1965) may be the best known. Perhaps her literary reputation outpaces her true...
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was the most substantial intellectual to reach high political office in the United States since Woodrow Wilson. Thus his life, writings, policy deliberations, and political efforts, and the effects of these, deserve the most careful and respectful attention. If the apocalyptic era of European history began with the outbreak of World...
James Webb, a genuine war hero and author of a worthy book (Fields of Fire) draws no interest as a Presidential candidate, but numerous Republicans who have never been anything but parasites and cannot even read, much less write a good book, are considered promising statesmen. I am told we must be a multicultural country....
Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a...
Sir Max Beerbohm, 1872–1956, was a famous caricaturist with a style very much his own. He was a successful author, too, though not a prolific one: a book of stories (Seven Men), a set of parodies (A Christmas Garland), and one fantasy novel (Zuleika Dobson) make up the sum of his output for most people. ...
On a flank of the White Mountains not far from the Maine state line lies a small New Hampshire town called Albany, population 735. Every seven years, town officials arrange for a surveyor to walk the boundaries of the town, clearing brush, cleaning up markers, and checking to see whether a neighboring, larger town might...
Art and literature are powerful mediums to convey timeless truths. In the Introduction to Catholic Literary Giants, Joseph Pearce declares the power of art to evangelize, a defense of the Catholic Faith he terms the “apologetics of beauty.” He cites Dante, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Tolkien, and Waugh as a Catholic’s literary “weapons” to wield against the...
A minority on the left is possibly willing to admit that a few “good Southerners” during the War Between the States opposed slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Probably a much smaller minority would concede that a considerable number of Northerners opposed the war either to preserve the Union or to free the slaves. That, in...
This is a book about life in a society from which higher goods have been expelled, leaving no place for love, wonder, or beauty. The “compulsion” of the title is that which guides people in such a setting. In default of anything better, people fall under the dominion of itches, obsessions, and impositions, and mistake...
In my youth I must have read nearly every word H.L. Mencken wrote—The American Language excepted, though I did dip into it from time to time before setting the book aside as being dry as the Sahara. A couple of weeks ago I ran into almost the entire set (the successive Supplements and Editions) at...
It is a commonplace among American conservatives that, at some point in the past, the way Americans understood their constitutional and cultural tradition diverged from the reality of the constitutional order established in 1787. For the Southern Agrarians and their intellectual descendants, the great change occurred with the Civil War, which elevated “union” over the...
“Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss is sometimes more deadly than the curse. ...
Having read Sir Philip Magnus’s biography of William Gladstone in graduate school, I recently picked up a copy of his King Edward the Seventh, published in 1964 and made the basis of a very excellent series by Masterpiece Theater, with the superb British actor Timothy West in the title role, a decade or so later. ...
John Derbyshire is among the most prominent and prolific of writers of the paleo or nationalist right. I think of him as a Tory, and his writing as Swiftian. Some readers of this magazine are likely regular readers of his online essays, a selection of which, all culled from the year 2013, have been reprinted...
Ann Coulter credits Peter Brimelow’s famous essay published in National Review in 1992 with delivering the blinding revelation that opened her eyes to the social and political crisis precipitated by the Establishment’s immigration policies since 1965. Having been rudely knocked off her horse, Miss Coulter has been hurling thunderbolts of her own all the way...
After publishing highly acclaimed biographies of Zola and Flaubert, the New York City-based Frederick Brown established himself as an expert on French cultural and intellectual life with his magnificent book For the Soul of France, a saga of the struggle between the militant secularists and the royalist reactionaries between the fall of Napoleon III and...
In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published The Imperial Presidency. He argued that the stretching of presidential power by Democrats Roosevelt and Truman had been necessary and benevolent, but that such behavior by Nixon was a dark threat to the commonwealth. Schlesinger’s childishly partisan and superficial tirade was soon forgotten. Time has moved on, and...
Washington and Brussels were surprised by the Kremlin’s strong reaction to the ousting of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February of last year. They shouldn’t have been. Yanukovych was forced out of office after he backed away from signing a Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, an agreement Moscow viewed as a threat to its economic...
One of the things that James VI of Scotland liked about becoming James I of England—apart from the money—was that as head of the Church of England he would never be bossed about by a Scotch Calvinist minister again. Moreover, unlike his predecessor Elizabeth I, who never cared much for that aspect of her job,...
My first exposure to Alexander Dugin came via YouTube, when I discovered Vladimir Pozner’s 2014 interview with the controversial theorist. Marred somewhat by cultural relativism, Dugin’s critique of Anglo-American empire nonetheless contained more depth than a year’s supply of the Washington Post. Civilization cannot exist without a willingness to use lethal force on its behalf,...
I guess the misguided call it whining—the apparent conservative fixation on modern awfulness; on the disappearance of morals, manners, handwritten notes, and neckties, and the concomitant nonstop appearance of . . . shall we just leave it at H. Rodham Clinton? Thanks, I’ll do that. The misguided require guidance into a loftier understanding of the...
The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times, by Brewster Chamberlain, just out from the University Press of Kansas, is one of those books that appears designed to turn a major literary career into a mere cottage industry. Nearly everything and anyone that could be related to Hemingway’s life and work, however distantly,...
By any reasonable measure, the policies carried out by the U.S. government since 1990 toward the Muslim countries of the Middle East (democracy promotion, regime change, political stabilization, “peace process,” antiterrorism) have failed disastrously. Not only is nothing better over there, but everything is worse over here, the home of the not-so-brave and ever-less-free. Every...
Thirty years ago Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was hardly visible on the American intellectual horizon, and the rare mention of his name in scholarly publications was usually dismissive. After all, Schmitt was a Nazi, a Catholic extremist, and an inveterate enemy of the liberal order. Today, Schmitt’s major works are available in English translation, and a...
I first encountered the poetry of B.H. Fairchild when I chose to review Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2003). Despite its odd, even off-putting title, which seems to extrude tendrils of the New Age, the book was—is—one of the best original collections of contemporary poetry I’ve read. It proceeded to win the...
Russian political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov once wrote that state power, or vlast, and not law “holds a sacred status in Russia.” Russians, according to Pastukhov, experience state power as a “mystical entity,” a “life giving substance,” a “deity” in its own right, from whom, in times of trouble, the narod (the people) expects answers. Anna...
Michel Houellebecq is one of France’s best regarded novelists, nonfiction writers, and essayists. His latest novel, Soumission (Submission), appearing some months after the publication of Éric Zemmour’s Le suicide français, in the same month as the murders at Charlie Hebdo, and following a series of killings of Jews by Muslims in several French cities and...
Blessed is the soul who, early in life, is gifted with a passionate interest in some art, craft, sport, pastime, or field of knowledge. The object of passion might be well-nigh anything at all, so long of course as it is not vicious: stamp collecting or field hockey, cabinetry or the Civil War, boxing or...
Everybody knows that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key as he watched the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812. But in 1861 Francis Key Howard wrote about his grandfather, “The flag which he then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over...
In general I am not a fan of conspiracy theories. A good historian learns that, in regard to controversial events, the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be accurate. I long ago took to heart Napoleon’s maxim that you should not blame on hidden machinations what can be more readily explained by incompetence....
The last 30 years or so have seen a remarkable shift in the understanding of English religious history at the time of the Reformation. There has always been a fringe minority of dissenters from the mainstream narrative of what Tennyson called England’s “rough island story,” but now some impeccably credentialed historians, among them Christopher Haigh...
One of the few parts of the U.S. Constitution that is still followed by the government concerns the granting of copyrights and patents. Article I, Section 8, reads, “Congress shall have the power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the...
When a former colleague sent me a snippet from The New Yorker of September 22, 2014—a piece called “As Big As the Ritz,” by Adam Gopnik—the attention therein given to two recent books on F. Scott Fitzgerald caught my eye, not only because I had already acquired one of them, but because I was repelled...
The flyleaf of this book sports a quote (“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original”) from an enthusiastic notice in the New York Times Book Review of a new translation of The Brothers Karamazov, which the Pevear-Volokh onsky tandem unleashed upon the English-speaking world a quarter of a century ago. As the author...
Philip Larkin, the poet-librarian of Hull University, died December 2, 1985, over 29 years ago. In the years since Andrew Motion published the first biography (1993), and Anthony Thwaite published both the first complete edition of the poems (1989) and the first collection of letters (1992), a small industry has grown up devoted to the...
No one excels at polemics as the French do, save for the English at certain periods of their history (the 17th and 18th centuries, for example), and Le suicide français is a masterly specimen of the genre by Éric Zemmour, the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction and a columnist for Le Figaro. ...
Poetry has to me never been what I have so often heard called a problem, and that was so for the simplest of reasons: It was never presented to me as a problem until I was advanced in school, after which it was reformulated as a target of incomprehending odium by students whose insensibility had...
This collection harkens back to a bygone era when the essay was a common medium of the literary artist. As one can pick up a volume of essays by G.K. Chesterton or Hilaire Belloc nearly a century after their first publication and still be enthralled and enchanted by their freshness and continuing relevance, the same...
The centennial of that enormous calamity later known as World War I saw the release of about a dozen books on the subject. Catastrophe 1914, by Sir Max Hastings, one of the foremost British military historians writing today, is an exhaustive, one-volume history of that annus horribilis and the events leading up to the fatal...
Like all relationships, the special transatlantic one is in a state of constant flux—warmer or cooler at different times, enhanced by empathy, marred by misunderstandings, riven by reality—but always affected by the personal qualities of the incumbents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 10 Downing Street. For a short but eventful span between January 1961 and...
The Confidence Trap is a book that, in spite of its many penetrating insights, peripheral as well as central to its thesis, on further examination is less striking and original than it promised to be. Runciman begins with an introductory chapter about Alexis de Tocqueville’s early contribution to understanding how democratic nations cope with crises...
Jared Carter, who has retired from a career in publishing, is a Midwestern poet of stature. He won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Poets’ Prize; he has had a Guggenheim fellowship and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is profiled in the Dictionary of...
I begin with a flourish of disclosure, which gives me great pleasure as a gesture of wistful recollection. Professor Baldwin was my roommate at university, occupying the bunk above mine. The wall space over that prisonlike fixture of canvas ticking and rude ironmongery was decorated with an enormous portrait of Karl Marx that would not...