One recent morning an opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post arrived unbidden in my email inbox. “Should Putin act, it would arguably be the greatest provocation since the end of the Cold War,” Rubin claimed. “Like the Berlin Wall and the blockade of Berlin before that, movement into Ukraine would be...
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A Forgotten Document
A few months after the close of the American Civil War there was a brief but intense and interesting correspondence between Lord Acton, the European historian of liberty, and General R.E. Lee, hero of the defeated Confederacy, on the issues of the war. In the course of this correspondence Acton commented that Appomattox had been...
Prophet of the Left
I first met my future colleague Raymond Williams in 1959, when I was a young lecturer in English literature at Cambridge and he still a tutor in adult education in Oxford. His best-known book. Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), had just appeared—a late-Marxist interpretation of English intellectual life since the French Revolution—and what I principally...
More Wine, Professor?
There may not be a word for “home” in French, philosophizes Twain in The Innocents Abroad, but “considering that they have the article itself in such an attractive aspect, they ought to manage to get along without the word.” Who has not seen semantic peculiarities insinuate themselves, with the facility of cognac taken on the...
Was George Will Wrong?
If Rush Limbaugh can pass for a conservative these days, it’s no marvel that George Will can, too. Unlike Limbaugh, he at least reads books, especially Victorian ones. (He even named his daughter Victoria.) But he shares with Limbaugh an easygoing approach to defining conservatism, to the extent that a tabloid tramp such as Rudy...
Hey, Elon Musk, You May Have a ‘Deep State’ Problem
Is “X,” the media company formerly known as “Twitter,” still experiencing deep state interference and silencing of conservatives? The evidence suggests that it is.
Villa Blanco, Villa Negro
Revealed in the headlights of the van, Las Palomas had never looked so depressing to Héctor as it did that night. Indeed, it appeared to him as positively sinister, a ghost town in which the few flesh-and-blood inhabitants were the apparitions, and the thronging specters from the past, the true living beings. It occurred to...
Was George Will Wrong?
If Rush Limbaugh can pass for a conservative these days, it’s no marvel that George Will can, too. Unlike Limbaugh, he at least reads books, especially Victorian ones. (He even named his daughter Victoria.) But he shares with Limbaugh an easygoing approach to defining conservatism, to the extent that a tabloid tramp such as Rudy...
Did You Hear the One About Syria?
From the top of the mountain that overlooks my Swiss chalet I can almost see Lake Geneva on a clear day, but thankfully, what I cannot see are the armies of so-called diplomats, flunkies, arms dealers, professional wallet lifters, con men, thieves, and men who have obviously been conceived by apes with a dose of...
Oriental Fumin’
It was not what we have come to expectwhen John Paul II arrives in a Christian country—or in any country, for that matter. In place of adoring crowds lining the streets along which the popemobile made its stately progress, there were scattered groups of demonstrators hurling imprecations both angry and somewhat bizarre: “arch-heretic, two-horned, grotesque...
On Russia
I agree with Professor W. Bruce Lincoln (“The Burden of Russian History,” March 1994) that Russia’s economic and political system is prone to break society into two parts: “them,” those responsible for making decisions and managing the country, and “us,” the simple people deadly indifferent to everything that doesn’t touch them immediately—i.e., high politics. I...
Katyn and ‘The Good War’
The decapitation of the Polish government last weekend, including President Lech Kaczynski and the military leadership, on that flight to Smolensk to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, brings to mind the terrible and tragic days and deeds of what many yet call the Good War. From Russian reports, the Polish pilot ...
Athens and Jerusalem V: The Germanization of Christianity
Some Tedious but Necessary Preliminaries The title of James C. Russell's The Germanization of Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation does not sound like the opening shot in a war against Christianity. However, ever since Sam Francis' apparently glowing review, conservative neopagans, atheists, and Nordicists have trumpeted the book ...
Remembering Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield formulated a political theory of limited liberalism around his Augustinian Christianity, which tempered personal liberty with the recognition of man's fallen nature.
The Real Cost of Electric Vehicles
For all their use in green virtue-signaling, electric cars have enormous hidden costs, both financial and humanitarian.
The Novel and the Imperial Self
Preoccupation with the state of the novel was until about 10 years ago one of the major bores of American criticism. From the early 1950’s well into the 60’s, it was scarcely possible to get through a month without reading as a rule in the Sunday book review supplements or the editorial page of Life—that...
A Documented Life
Muriel Spark (1992 winner of the Ingersoll Foundation’s T.S. Eliot Award) is a prolific writer with some 19 novels to her credit as well as volumes of poetry, short stories, criticism, and biography. Yet she was a surprisingly late starter. She was nearly 40 when her first novel, The Comforters, appeared, its theme provided by...
Face to Face Against Trump, Will Biden Dare Repeat the Charlottesville Big Lie?
Seven years after Charlottesville Biden continues to insist, with no media pushback, Trump called white nationalists "very fine people," even though that’s patently false.
Empire States of Mind
Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World by Jeremy Black Encounter Books 216 pp., $25.99 Although this relatively short book is closer to an extended, episodic essay than to the comprehensive history of the British empire implied by the title, it is an excellent example of the author’s style. Jeremy Black takes a broad...
The Greening of America
This handsome book, with its dust-jacket reproduction of Hughson Hawley’s Laying the Tracks at Broadway and 14th Street (ca. 1891), is unique in American anthology-making. While it has long been acknowledged that Irish American fiction and drama constitute what Charles Fanning called, in The Irish Voice in America, “a distinctive and complex literary heritage,” Irish...
The Good Things in Death
It has been argued that, of all human deeds, only the act of conception is selfless, since, for the briefest of instants that consummate it, neither the man nor the woman ever thinks of himself or herself, but always of the other. And it can further be said that this is precisely where our lifelong...
The Path Not Taken
McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union by Ethan S. Rafuse Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 525 pp., $35.00 Walt Whitman remarked after it was over that “the real war will never get in the books,” and, despite all the volumes that have been written since then, his prediction remains largely...
Turkey: The AKP Regime Is Not in Trouble, But Erdogan Is
Hundreds of Turkish police officers backed by armored cars moved in on Istanbul’s Taksim Square early Tuesday morning and reclaimed the site after pulling out on June 1. By midday bulldozers had removed barricades of paving stones and corrugated iron. The crackdown surprised protesters, hundreds of whom had been sleeping in a makeshift camp...
All Play and No Work
A kid today, if he aspires to anything other than slack itself, aspires to one of three “crafts”: acting, sports, or rock ’n’ roll. He wants either to play a part, to play a game, or to play guitar. He wants to be a player. The work ethic has been replaced by the shirk-and-perks ethic: “I’d...
Books in Brief: August 2022
Short reviews of The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, by Marc Morris, and Wrath: America Engraged, by Peter Wood.
A New Logic of Human Studies
Consider the following paradoxes. A welfare system designed by well-meaning politicians guided by the advice of the wisest sociologists and economists available, costing billions of dollars, whose net effect is radically to increase the numbers of the poor, especially women and children, and to deepen their misery, incapacity, and despair. A stock market which rises...
When Will It Snow Again?
It’s late September in Russia, and Muscovites are already placing wagers on when the first snow will come. The weather has simply been too good to be true; the sun has been shining and the temperatures mild, which, to the Russian mind at least, is a bad sign. The Russians have never trusted good fortune...
Snow Princess Does Beijing
Poor Gu Ailing, or, as we call her here in the country of her birth, Eileen Gu. She claims to have jumped ship to join the Chinese team for this year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing because she hoped to inspire young athletes on both sides of the Pacific, and to spread goodwill between the nation...
In the Old Days
The Insensitivity Squad has struck again: this time against a board game and a marching band. Parker Brothers, venerable producer of board games, was recently denounced by the head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, left-Republican Susan Engeleiter. It seems that its new game, Careers for Girls, for ages 8-12, lists six “careers” for the...
Pop Idols
The English middle orders from Ruskin onward have had an inbred prejudice against America. True, they may dress like mutant versions of Kurt Cobain and bundle themselves and their cloaca-tongued broods off to Disney World, but when you say “U.S.A.,” much of the professional class still thinks of headlines like “NEW JERSEY BABY BORN WITH...
Italian Lessons
Two or three times a week, after dinner, I watch the traffic jam outside Franco’s bar. What causes it nobody knows, but a perfectly ordinary intersection of two perfectly ordinary country roads is suddenly blocked. Nobody knows why the best watermelon is the one with the smallest spot on the bottom, or how come the...
No Party for Old White Men
For Nancy Pelosi, 78, Steny Hoyer, 79, and Joe Biden, 75, the primary results from New York’s 14th congressional district are a fire bell in the night. All may be swept away in the coming revolution. That is the message of the crushing defeat of 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, who had aspired to succeed Pelosi...
Still Sorry After All These Years
With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery. And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and...
By Their Clichés, You Shall Know Them
At least since September 11, the buzz-phrase for every investigation has been “connect the dots.” Republicans were highly imaginative in connecting the dots between Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, while Democrats preferred connecting the dots between Enron executives and the Bush administration. Donald Rumsfeld, who has raised this kind of...
Envy and the Consumerism of the Have—Nots
You can make a good argument that, by the late 20th century, the Seven Deadly Sins had become the Seven Lively Virtues. In the 1960’s, the media lauded the anger of students who bombed police stations and set dormitories on fire. Hollywood glorified lust the way it had once glorified chastity. Government at every level...
Anti-Imperial Judo
The basic principle of judo, so I have been told, is to use your enemy’s strength against him. I was forced to apply this principle more than once in college, when my athletic friends, invigorated by the joy of youth and a fifth of Jack Daniels, would suddenly realize how pleasant it would be to...
The Atheist’s Redemption
In my last appearance in this space, I wrote erroneously that Christopher Hitchens had favored both Anglo-American wars on Iraq. In fact, he strongly opposed the first one, back in 1991. I remember this so vividly (I was delighted with him at the time) that I can’t understand how I could be so embarrassingly forgetful...
Foreign Aid That Ain’t So Foreign
As 1995 drew to a close, Senate Democrats and Republicans were still debating Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms’ legislation to restructure the State Department and its ancillary agencies. Helms wanted to jettison the United States Agency for International Development, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the United States Information Agency, fold their functions...
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...
Hanging With the Snarks: An Academic Memoir
There seemed to be little interest among audience members [at a scholarly meeting] in whether the ideas I had presented were true, only in whether their application would bring about results they liked. —Jason Jewell I used to have a running argument with a colleague, a great scholar now gathered to his fathers, during...
Executive Poppycock
Terry Eastland, formerly of the Reagan Justice Department, has written a learned book explaining that, according to the Constitution, embarrassing crimes in an administration can only be investigated by prosecutors on a leash held by the President whom those crimes embarrass. Eastland’s target is Title VI of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which...
I Love My Mother
Sicko Produced by The Weinstein Company Directed and written by Michael Moore Michael Moore calls his films documentaries, but they’re really sockumentaries. He is cinema’s heavyweight master of the sucker punch. Behind his slovenly, shambling flabbiness, he packs a vicious left hook. That’s politically left, of course. Now, some suckers deserve to be pounded by...
Place and Presence, Holy Hills and Sacred Cities
In classical times, the city was a sacred place, bounded by a wall, in which civilization occurred, and to live outside the city was to be uncivilized. To be the founder of a city was to be god-like, so that there are at least six Alexandrias, the work of Alexander the Great; several Antiochs, named...
A Fork in Europe’s Road
European leaders have a decision to make: treat Russia as an integral part of Europe with legitimate security concerns, or treat her as an Asiatic pariah to be crippled.
After the Confederates, Who’s Next?
On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman’s troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah. Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, who was...
The Stuffed Grape Leaf Standard
Danger lurks everywhere these days, even in five gallon plastic tubs of feta cheese. The containers of feta delivered to our restaurant come embellished with sketches of a baby falling headfirst into a bucket of cheese, which is preserved in liquid, and therefore comes complete with grim warnings of possible drownings in English and Español....
Room to Pass
Few people read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) much anymore. Lines from his poems were once on the tips of tongues the world over. Students used to memorize “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” and lines from “Evan-geline” and “Hiawatha.” Longfellow’s once-great literary reputation rivaled that of Tennyson and Dickens, and, after his death, the American...
Bribemasters
‘The devil’s boots don’t creak.’ —Scottish proverb Many who take money from him, attend his conferences, or publish their articles in his publications will point to his anti-Communism. Others support the civil liberty issues he seems to embody. Some reassure themselves by seeing the influential people with whom he travels. A few employ the rationale...
Passing the Bottle
In the aftermath of a conference not long ago, a dozen of us spent a night in downtown Little Rock. (No, this wasn’t the Economic Summit. It was a gathering of poets, novelists, and essayists to discuss Southern autobiography, and the talk was a whole lot better.) All in all, I’m a little more cheerful...
The Eudaemonic Serb
The Ritz Club, the casino arm of the venerable and resplendent hotel in Piccadilly, is, for the discriminating player with an 18th-century sense of what gambling is all about, “the other place.” Apart from the late John Aspinall’s hallowed sepulchre in Curzon Street, this subterranean alhambra is the only privately owned gambling club in London. ...