First Persons Singular

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It is both satisfying and subversive that Herman Koch, the author of The Ditch, was, if not exactly expelled, at least “encouraged to leave” his Montessori school in Amsterdam. While any failed attempt at “child-centered” education will warm a chilly reactionary heart, young Koch’s inability to summon up enough self-discipline to survive indiscipline must be regarded as a disappointing rejection of the conscientiousness the Dutch have traditionally, if not always correctly, been thought to possess.

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Gray's Anatomy

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The British philosopher John Gray has been on the Left, and he has been on the Right. More recently, he has settled into the role of a brilliant, provocative, and contrarian curmudgeon, known for an aphoristic style rare in a discipline where opacity is often confused with erudition.

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Confessions of a Revolutionary

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Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, and the 20th century would have been a better century had it been more influential still. Yet until now, the book could only be read at one remove, in editions based on a hasty English translation of a German text presumed lost in the confusion of wartime.

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Crass Capital

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In an age when cultural appropriation is “problematic,” the EU is a repeat offender. Not content with stealing a continent’s name and rewriting its history, the engineers of “ever closer union” have spent years squeezing centuries of art into a “European” (as they abuse that term) straitjacket, a maneuver anticipated by General de Gaulle during a press conference over half a century ago. Dante, Goethe, and Chateaubriand, he agreed, “belonged to Europe” insofar as they were Italian, German, and French. But they would not have done much for Europe had they lacked a nationality and written in some sort of “harmonized Esperanto or” — and here de Gaulle reinforced mockery with erudition — “Volapük.” 

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In 2020, Trump has everything to lose

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November 2020 is still a long way away, but it already looks as if the next presidential election will be lost not won.
It is not a given that America’s economy will hold up, but if it does, Donald Trump, as the incumbent, would normally have a good chance of hanging onto his job. However, “normally” is not a word that applies to a president forever a tweet, a fiasco or a past, present or future scandal away from disaster. Then there are the polls. Trump has had the lowest average approval ratings of any president since Gallup started measuring them in the 1930s, and he has yet to hit 50 per cent even once. He prevailed in 2016 with the smallest share of the popular vote (46.1 per cent) since a complicated four-way tussle in 1824.

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Agencies of disruption

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Heidi Tworek’s shrewd, erudite and timely News from Germany is a work of historical analysis that can also be read as a corrective to the dangerous hysteria over the information games—fake news and all the rest—currently being played over the internet. The tale she tells is, in no small part, an account of how a nation that understood more clearly than most how the dissemination of news could be used as a device to project power beyond its borders tried to break its rivals’ (accidental) dominance in this area. For more than half a century, this was, argues Tworek, an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia, an obsession for “an astonishing array of German politicians, industrialists, military leaders and journalists”.

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Such, Such Were the Joys

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Britain’s “public,” which is to say private, schools have been around since at least the 14th century. The controversy over their place in the country’s life sometimes seems to have been raging for almost as long, although it really only took off a couple hundred years ago, the day before yesterday in a land of ancient grievances.

“Gilded Youth,” James Brooke-Smith ’s addition to the sizeable canon of unflattering accounts of these curious establishments, has plenty of room for familiar complaints: bullying, sadism, sexual abuse, emotional repression, entrenching “the privilege of the wealthy few,” and so on. But even those exhausted with this well-worn topic may be intrigued by Mr. Brooke-Smith’s examination of the surprisingly complex history of public school dissent—there were some inmates who struck back against what they saw as asylums.

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Boris Johnson Is Being Prosecuted over a Campaign Slogan

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Britain is a country where tweeting, preaching, or posting the wrong thing can get someone in trouble with the police. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Boris Johnson, one of the most prominent of those who campaigned for the U.K. to leave the EU — and now a possible leader of the Conservative party — is facing prosecution for the official Leave campaign’s claim that the U.K. sent “the EU £350 million a week.” This was money, Vote Leave asserted, that could be used to help fund the perpetually needy National Health Service, a claim that was plastered along the side of its big red campaign bus.

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Before There Was Thatcher

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If you can remember the 1960s, many are said to have said, you weren’t really there. But if Britain fails to remember the 1970s, it may soon find itself in a place where it really should not want to be. Towards the end of the latter, infinitely less entertaining decade, a good number of those at the top of Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition Labour party made their political debut as members of a hard Left that was far less of a fringe than it deserved to be. They have come a long way since, but their thinking has not, and with the Conservatives being broken apart by a botched Brexit, Corbyn’s own ’70s show could be playing in Downing Street soon.

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Myths, legends & monsters

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There’s a passage in Cold Calls (2005), the final volume in Christopher Logue’s magnificent and, fittingly, never-completed “account” of the Iliad, in which the British poet describes Ajax and Nestor calling on Achilles:

They find him, with guitar,

Singing of Gilgamesh.

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