“History never repeats, but it does rhyme.” It’s a good line (though Mark Twain probably never said it). I see history rhyming in modern leftist ideology, which seems to contain blasphemous corruptions of three central Catholic doctrines: miraculous birth, immaculate conception and transubstantiation. Leftists mock and reject these doctrines in their original Christian form, but […]
It’s one of the most interesting, enlightening and eye-opening books I’ve ever read: Simon Winchester’s Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (2018). Winchester tells a story of astonishing ingenuity, intelligence and effort from the steam-engine (44) to the “extreme ultraviolet” laser (296). And it’s almost exclusively a story of stale pale males—of White […]
Like all decent people, I stand unshakably with the powerless Jewish community against the vile scourge of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish racism. And in order to better defend cowering Jews against their hugely powerful enemies, I’ve often asked myself: What is the most anti-Semitic nation on earth? Is it Iran, perhaps? Well, no. Not by a […]
Who’s the greatest hero in popular English literature? I’d say it’s James Bond. And who’s the greatest anti-hero? I’d say it’s Flashman, the protagonist of a hugely entertaining mock-historical series written by George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008). Slave-trading, slave-stealing and murder The character Flashman originally appeared as a coward, cad and bully in the Victorian novel […]
If you like books that are both entertaining and intelligent, here’s some advice that’s been good for two centuries and more: read The Monk. Written by a highly gifted teenager called Matthew Lewis and first published in 1796, this greatest of Gothic novels sparkles with wit and wisdom. Among much else, it contains one of […]
Shakespeare got it wrong. “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,” says King Duncan in Macbeth (c. 1606), meaning that psychology can’t be read from physiognomy. But Shakespeare never saw Priti Patel, the British-born Indian Hindu who currently serves as Home Secretary. When you look at Patel’, do you see gentleness, […]
In the year 2000, the small Yorkshire town of Rotherham was little-known in Britain, let alone overseas. In 2020, Rotherham is infamous around the world as a place where Pakistani rape-gangs have been raping, prostituting and murdering working-class White girls for decades. Meanwhile, the staunchly socialist and fiercely feminist Labour council and Labour MP, Denis […]
