Posted in Arts and Letters, Civilization, New.
At first glance our two authors could hardly be more unlike. Judging from his new book Beauty, Roger Scruton’s idea of a pleasing view would probably be the Wiltshire countryside circa 1750 — a scene like that on his website banner, with perhaps some red-coated riders, left, and a fox, courant, hurrying into a copse…
Posted in New, People, Tribalism.
What’s with The Arabian Nights? How can we explain the lasting attraction of the mysteriously medieval East? The djinns? The camels? The metamorphoses? The alluring houris in dove-grey veils? Or could it be for some readers the vision of exquisitely delayed beheadings — so unlike the rude obliteration of roadside bombs?
A sense of danger is a wonderful thing. Like Darwin said, don’t leave home without it. A sense of danger — or at the very least a prudential wariness in unknown territory — warns you of the bear in the cave, the croc in the creek, the shark beyond the breakers…
Posted in New.
It had been a pretty ordinary day at the office, metaphysically speaking, but it looked like ending with a bang. Plato was showing Aristotle something he’d found on the web…
In plain English and with exemplary candor, Ayaan Hirsi Ali compares the virtues of Western civilization with the vices of her original homeland in Somalia, argues that not all cultures or religions are equal, notes the flood of refugees heading west from the Islamic lands, and points to the dangers to their hosts as well as the risks to the migrants themselves…
Posted in Africana.
The African peoples now being pillaged and destroyed have names like Zaghawa, Fur, and Massalit, and they live in the extensive region of Western Sudan called Darfur. The Arab horsemen of the apocalypse laying waste the land are called janjaweed, and they are acting for familiar reasons: an unswerving sense of racial destiny…
Posted in Arts and Letters.
It’s a shame really. Paris Hilton could easily give sluttishness a bad name. I don’t mean just the video that’s available—I mean the chilling vacuity: it’s enough to give Casanova the wilts. But that’s by the way. My darker purpose here is to see how the ethical world of Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic, with its moral Puritanism and devotion to hard work, could be adapted and parodied for TV trash starring rich party girls and poor dumb animals in the year 2003…
Posted in Artists And Politics.
Where are the sheiks of yesteryear, riding romantically over the dunes? Not in Australia. Here a burly Egyptian with an ugly turn of phrase recently set new records for ungallantry. Scantily clad Australian women, complained Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, go around like “exposed meat” inviting rape…
Posted in Tribalism.
The Roosevelt Indian Reservation in the Amazon rain forest is not a happy place. In 2004 the Cinta Larga Indians slaughtered 29 miners there, and the Brazilian who was trying to mediate the conflict was later murdered at a…
Posted in People.
We know how it ended. But what was Sir Francis Galton thinking of when eugenics began? What led from the quiet book-lined study of a Victorian scientific worthy, loved by his family and admired by his peers, to the charnel houses of the Nazi era?
Posted in Civilization.
Now that sporadic sniping in Baghdad looks set to escalate into more serious guerrilla activity this might be the time to take another look at Colonel Lawrence. He had lots of experience at this sort of thing and was an able theorist…
Posted in Civilization.
We found many of the natives dressed in a thin French gauze, which they called ‘byqui’, this being a light airy dress, and well calculated to display the shape of their persons. The manners of these females, however, were rude and troublesome in the highest degree…
Posted in Civilization, People.
He was quietly dressed, “a soft-spoken man with a pleasant, kindly voice, agreeable, friendly, human, and considerate.” Mozart was important, and helped keep his pessimism at bay. But however friendly and soft-spoken he was on a sunny day with a song in his heart…
Posted in Civilization.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one…
