Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The Greatest of These
Colbert Kearney comes from a strong republican tradition: his IRB grandfather wrote the words of the national anthem. The grandson’s memoir, however, is less concerned with ‘the people’ than with persons, in particular his father, whose love for his family…
For the dark times ahead
In the early 1930s Bertolt Brecht fled Germany for Prague, then spent some time in Paris before escaping to Denmark, Sweden and eventually Finland, before finally travelling via the Soviet Union to the United States. His experience as a mid-twentieth…
Martha or Mary?
Should religious women stay in their own ‘female’ spheres, or compete on an equal level with men in worlds constructed by and for men? Some Protestant American women have chosen to follow the religious life quietly while others embrace showbusiness…
Morbid symptoms
The Western literary canon is only one casualty in North American departments of English, superseded by courses designed to redress the sins of white male patriarchs and colonialists. The curriculum spirals outwardly, growing ever more specialised by cultural minority.
Tarantulas and Dynamite
Nietzsche’s reputation was tarnished for a long time by his posthumous adoption by Hitler. In fact the philosopher was repelled by antisemitism. It is now clear that his writings were curated after his death by his sister Elisabeth to make…
A troll avant la lettre
‘You can’t say a thing these days’ is the predictable chorus of the reactionary in the face of ‘political correctness gone mad’. In reality they say all they want to say: as the French antisemitic writer Céline put it, ‘once…
Macavity was there
Founded in 1929, Faber & Faber had the benefit of the best connections and an astute director who also happened to be one of Britain’s greatest poets. Still, it might not have survived all those years as an independent publisher…
Smile, and turn up the power
In a Yale experiment in the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram found that large numbers of ordinary, inoffensive people were prepared to administer painful electric shocks to another person, similarly ordinary and inoffensive, sometimes even when a fatality seemed possible.
Trooping the velvet
November 1989 in Prague is remembered by its foot soldiers as a dizzying succession of demonstrations and hopeful propaganda expeditions into the provinces. No one was sure if the revolution would hold, and today it seems that many of its…
Muscular Contrarian
While Enoch Powell was undoubtedly moved by principles, and in his own words possessed of ‘a savage reliance on the workings of my own intellect’, there was more artifice, more deliberation in and more conscious cultivation of his public persona…
Up and doing
The novelist John Buchan was both patriotic Scot and unionist Briton. And while his work often reveals an unpleasant racism, this sunny-tempered dynamo was still able, as someone from the political periphery, to respect cultural difference and aspirations to independence.
Dodging the consequences
Jonathan Sumption’s characterisation of the United Kingdom’s constitution is typical of many British writers. ‘Britain is an ancient State with a long and unbroken constitutional history.’ That is to say we are unique, and have avoided the upheavals and violence…