This is a massive biography of an economic historian whose popular fame rests on his having been made one of 65 Companions of Honour by the Queen while remaining a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It suffers from many of the difficulties encountered by biographers of men of thought. Like William Howard...
At the security conference in Munich over the weekend and at the EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, VP Mike Pence offered profuse assurances to the European elite class that the Trump administration supports unity and cohesion in the face of various threats allegedly facing the Western alliance. His remarks amounted to an explicit repudiation...
“ . . . redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” —Ephesians 5:15 “Go day, come day. Lord, send Sunday.” My paternal grandmother could be counted on to say these words at least once per week. Whether burdened with some mundane task or confronted with the evidence of human frailty, the prospect of the...
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...
Dean Olson, the chairman of Rockford Acromatic Products, an after-market auto-parts manufacturer, is a longtime supporter of Republican candidates. Still, he is not optimistic about the November election: “Even though the Democrats are in full rout, we’re not able to mount an effective challenge. I don’t see the leadership there.” While Rockford voters lean Democratic,...
Are the Democrats headed for their Little Bighorn, with President Joe Biden as Col. Custer? The wish, you suggest, is father to the thought. Yet, consider. On taking office, Biden held a winning hand. Three vaccines, with excellent efficacy rates, had been created and were being administered at a rate of a million shots a...
Madeleine Albright’s rendition this summer of Madonna impersonating Evita Peron (“Don’t cry for me, Argentinaaaa . . . “) was neither intrinsically interesting nor aesthetically pleasing. The venue was an aircraft—paid by you and me—en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Singapore; and according to an eyewitness, the only thing missing was a red orchid...
Concerned about declining confidence in his administration’s policy in Iraq—and, equally important, falling support for his reelection campaign—President George W. Bush gave the first of several planned speeches on Iraq to an audience at the Army War College. Alas, he offered the usual platitudes about providing Iraq “a free, representative government” and occupying that country...
Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist. —Edmund Burke I was reading Arthur Goldhammer’s translation of Maurice Lever’s Sade as the Senator Packwood scandal raged on, and although I wouldn’t want to draw any unwarranted comparisons between the two bonhommes, the parallels between Ancien Régime France and contemporary America are unmistakable. Debauchery reigns...
“Japan didn’t fight wars of aggression. Only China now says so,” declared Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of Japan’s wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo, in an interview with the Japan Times in late June. Yuko was half right. Although Japan fought several wars of aggression, only China seems to raise the issue today. America dropped...
The shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, are still reverberating—accentuating some of the enormous problems with public education. American high schools are plagued with low academic standards, moral relativism, political correctness, student apathy, and social permissiveness. All of this has led to a deterioration in students’ commitment to learning, their sense of direction,...
In failing to fact check his story on Harris’s involvement in the Kavanaugh affair, Shapiro ends up pushing the liberal narrative.
Londonistan: The content is in the book’s title. Melanie Phillips, the author, had great difficulty in finding a publisher; no main house would take it, even though she is a distinguished and successful writer, and in the end it came out in 2006 with a minor publisher, Gibson Square. The book’s theme is that Britain...
National Review hasn’t been this fun to read since it used to try to be funny—and succeed—decades ago. Each day brings a new hysterical reaction to the political success of Donald Trump, which NR writers variously predict will lead to the end of conservatism, or democracy, or America, or perhaps even the universe, with the...
One day, perhaps, a great history of socialism will be written. A daunting task, but not impossible, since socialism, the “ism,” is not very old—a relatively new phenomenon, during the last 200 years or even less. A history of social justice; a history of the working classes; a history of the poor—that would overwhelm any...
Politics and tale-telling are virtually inseparable activities. Great political events—wars, rebellions, social crusades—do not exert their full measure of influence until they are whittled into legends. More than one British statesman has derived his understanding of the Wars of the Roses from Shakespeare’s Histories, and in the United States the stories of Washington at Valley...
A book that has failed to go anywhere internationally, contrary to the author’s expectation, is a recent study by a Chilean Jewish academic who teaches philosophy at the University of Berlin, Victor Farías. His work deals with the youthful thought and career of Salvador Allende, who, between 1970 and 1973, headed the Marxist Government of...
Gloria is angry. This is nothing new, of course, but these days her righteous indignation is directed against Hollywood. She is angry at Hollywood stars who adopt children only to neglect them, and she is outraged by stage parents who prostitute dim-witted girls like Britney and Lindsay and Miley to the entertainment “industry.” She says...
Chappaquiddick Produced and distributed by Entertainment Studios Directed by John Curran Screenplay by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan A Quiet Place Produced by Platinum Dunes Directed and written by John Krasinski Distributed by Paramount Pictures On July 18, 1969, Sen. Edward Kennedy infamously drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. He had left a late-night...
If Trump really wants to hit a home run, and if he wants to pick the man most in touch with this American moment, then it has to be J.D. Vance.
By Thursday, the targets of the mailed pipe bombs had risen to nine: George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Maxine Waters, John Brennan, Eric Holder, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Biden and Robert De Niro. That list contains four of the highest-ranking officials of Barack Obama’s administration: the president himself, his vice president, his secretary of...
I began my relationship with Harvey visualizing Rolls-Royces and starlets. I ended up as so many writers have—staggering, script in hand, out of this erstwhile mogul’s office straight into the nearest bar; a cut-rate version of Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. Attend to this cautionary tale, all of you who would avoid the same...
The red-faced, middle-aged man with the bullhorn standing in London’s Oxford Street cut straight to the chase. “If,” he shouted, “Oliver Cromwell had been here today and had seen us all bowing and scraping to this ridiculous old woman and her bloody kids, he would have started another civil war . . . Wake up!”...
After receiving a number of kind messages, imploring me to continue this discussion, I have decided to ransack some old essays for more material on the question of women. If I do not respond to every writeback, it is because of lack of time. It is a feminist truism that women have always worked. Even...
Dreams Produced by Hisao Kurosawa and Mike Y. Inoue Written and directed by Akira Kurosawa Released by Warner Brothers Man Without Pigs Produced and directed by Chris Owen The Women Who Smile Produced and directed by Joanne Head The plan was terrific—as many plans are. I’d go up to New York to see selected films...
Reviews of two new films: The Contractor, directed by Tarik Saleh, and The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers.
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American. At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...
A long time ago, I happened upon a cartoon in some publication or other. A single frame—in the vein of Gary Larson—depicted thousands of sheep rushing headlong off a cliff. In the middle of this great multitude, one particular sheep moved in the opposite direction. “Excuse me…excuse me…excuse me,” it bleated. That scene came to...
At first glance, Niccolò Machiavelli’s books The Prince and Discourses on Livy seem at odds. The former is chiefly a revolutionary guide to power, reveling in a ferocious spectacle of violence. The latter is a kind of manuscript on good governance that takes ancient Rome as its subject and model. Machiavelli’s aims in The Prince are at once revolutionary and conservative....
Vera Drake Produced by Thin Man Films and Studio Canal Written and directed by Mike Leigh Distributed by New Line Cinema Birth Produced and distributed by Fine Line Features Directed by Jonathan Glazer Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Milo Addica Mike Leigh, one of Britain’s socialist directors, begins and ends his latest effort, Vera Drake,...
Declining prosperity is now a settled fact of American life. Prosperity is not measured by the day’s average of stock speculation, or the profits of bankers, or the munificence of government subsidies and salaries, or the consumption of luxury goods, or even by the Gross Domestic Product. It is amazing how in a few short...
Ned Flanders—the gregarious, effeminate, Bible-thumping next-door-neighbor of Homer J. Simpson—has been canonized by Christianity Today, the leading voice of American evangelicalism. On the February 2001 cover, “Saint Flanders” is depicted in a Byzantine icon, holding a jewel-covered book in his left hand and making the sign of the Holy Trinity with his right. Marge and...
If China begins to reclaim and militarize Scarborough Shoal, says Philippines President Benigno S. Aquino III, America must fight. Should we back down, says Aquino, the United States will lose “its moral ascendancy, and also the confidence of one of its allies.” And what is Scarborough Shoal? A cluster of rocks and reefs, 123 miles...
I began this novel, set in Germany between the two world wars, after watching Valkyrie. I found the film both shallow and grandiose, dominated by clicking heels and clashing chords; the choice of Tom Cruise to play Claus von Stauffenberg was singularly inept. Cruise is a Hollywood celebrity; the personality of Stauffenberg—an aristocrat, soldier, and man...
In his latest nationally syndicated column, “Another Terror Attack: More Terror, More Denials,” Cal Thomas notes that many people are afraid to say what should be said about the link between Islam and terrorism for fear of being labeled an “Islamophobe.” He warns that “those who deny the threat of Islamic extremism in this country...
To judge from what is going on in Italy, the only major European country where populists are in power, right-wing populism works, but left-wing populism does not. Populism, they tell us, is a meaningless word. What else, after all, can populism mean but what is popular? And so, so what? Nevertheless, populism does exist. Here...
Many Central Europeans who are now in their late middle age or older have fond memories of American soldiers in their midst. In France in 1944, nylon stockings and chocolates were the tools of seduction, resented by men and welcomed by ladies. In Germany in early 1945, the G.I. came to be seen as liberator,...
“It is a noble faculty of our nature which enables us to connect our thoughts, sympathies and happiness with what is distant in place and time; and looking before and after, to hold communion at once with our ancestors and our posterity. There is a moral and philosophical respect for our ancestors, which elevates the...
Identity politics is now the term du jour and its meaning is clear enough on a superficial level—choosing people according to their physical characteristics and sexual preferences. The left wants more people of color, women, and gays in influential positions, while the right insists that these traits are secondary to competence in a given job....
In 1989, Japanese businessman Minoru Isutani purchased Pebble Beach’s famous golf course for $850 million, and Mitsubishi Estate Company paid $846 million for 51 percent of New York’s Rockefeller Center. The United States cowered from the kamikaze attack of Japanese capital on American business. American students swamped Japanese language programs, as the Land of the Rising...
The bus from Budapest to Belgrade is full, and I am lucky to get a seat. We are a cosmopolitan lot. In addition to the two Americans (I am traveling with Bill Mills, or “Brat [brother] Bill” as he will come to be known), there are two Norwegian businessmen sitting across the aisle reading the...
(This op-ed is written by a politically correct analyst, who will remain anonymous, but brought to you by Walter E. Block.) I cannot in good conscience take the COVID vaccine. Why not? Because its producers are mainly toxic white males. We wokesters want a COVID vaccine created in a more inclusive manner. Yes, yes, we...
“Half-alien and wholly undesirable” was Lady Astor’s assessment of Winston Churchill. For Winston’s father, Randolph Churchill, had taken an American wife, “a dollar princess,” as many cash-strapped members of the English aristocracy did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Lord Randolph, dead at age 46, left no inheritance. Poor Winston had to...
By now, we should all be familiar with the antitraditionalist left’s attempt to erase all traces of opposition to the liberal world order. Over the past decade or so, for example, the antitraditionalists have succeeded brilliantly in demolishing the understanding of marriage that has persisted in every civilized society since the dawn of recorded history. ...
Entertainment industry awards shows are, almost by definition, public orgies of televised backslapping. Still, TV viewers stick with them, not so much to discover what the best movie, TV show, or record is—for each viewer already knows what’s best—but in order to see personalities in environments that put them out of character and in competition...
North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il is rumored to be ailing or even dead. Given his furtive ways and the nature of his regime, denials from Pyongyang are meaningless unless ...
George Santayana’s dictum—“Those who forget the past . . . ”—has long since become one of those clichés beloved of high-school history teachers, who never tire of repeating it to their indifferent charges. But Santayana would surely have agreed that forgetting is sometimes necessary. To dwell obsessively on the past, as any spurned lover knows,...
“Knowing that religion does not furnish grosser bigots than law, I expect little from old judges.” —Thomas Jefferson A society governed by the judiciary—rather than by the will of the majority—displays odd characteristics. On July 29, 1994, a seven-year-old girl in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, was sexually assaulted and murdered. A neighbor who is a...
Which presidents of the United States have done a job of work? This little survey is limited to those born in the 20th century. Before that, everybody worked. Let’s start with our present leader. He has never lifted a shovel or driven a truck or had to make a payroll. He has never grown a...
The events in Gaza since July 7 have shown, not for the first time, Israel’s difficulty in coping with the challenges of asymmetric warfare. The problem first became apparent in Lebanon exactly eight years ago (July-August 2006), when Hezbollah – the weaker party by several orders of magnitude – was able to exploit Israeli political...