1,758 words
Edward McLaren
Bothelford’s Gone
Maldon Press, 2026.
Edward McLaren’s debut novel confronts the greatest scandal in recent British history: the systematic sexual exploitation of vulnerable English girls by predominantly Muslim grooming gangs, enabled by institutional cowardice, class prejudice, and fear of appearing racist. (more…)
Diogenes Laertius. Unknown artist, 1688.
Diogenes Laertius. Unknown artist, 1688.
3,190 words
One of the most famous paintings with a philosophical theme is Raphael’s The School of Athens. It was painted between 1509 and 1511, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, and was one of four large works commissioned by Pope Julius II to decorate a main room in the Vatican Palace. It exemplifies the Renaissance improvement of perspective techniques which Raphael learned from Leonardo, and depicts a large group of classical philosophers. Among the throng, Julius’ nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, can be seen on the left, and is the only figure looking out at the viewer, which we might call the “Renaissance gaze.” (more…)
2,195 words
Eric Hoffer
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951
In the years following the Second World War, Americans needed reassurances that the war and the hideous suffering it engendered had purpose. They wanted to know that their fathers and sons and husbands and brothers had not been killed or maimed for no reason at all, but somehow for the ultimate betterment of civilization. Such reassurances made everyone feel better. In 1951 a self-educated former stevedore named Eric Hoffer provided just the tonic for a still-grieving people—The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. (more…)
9,892 words
Gomery Kimber
The Killing House (The Big Shilling, Book One)
Procursus Press, 2020
“It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all about… a rare being”—Alan Watts[1]
“If you will it, it is no dream.”—Theodor Herzl
After checking operational security once more, I carefully opened the self-destruct bag and gingerly removed the only content: a book, apparently titled The Killing House.
The Killing House? What’s this all about? The publisher blurbs it thusly:
Troy has one ambition in life, to be an international hitman. (more…)
2,777 words
Eugene Rogan
The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East
New York: Basic Books, 2024
The stories of both Syria and Lebanon are significant. The recent history of both those lands is mostly unknown in America and Europe, but what happens in both places affect all parts of Western Civilization. Recently, Syria was the scene of a vicious civil war in which forces from Europe, Russia, and the United States were pulled in. (more…)
1,514 words
Is Myth to Power, by Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer, a satire of the thinking of the conspiritorial “rightoid” or simply an attempt to make money out of him?
I can only assume that the thought process behind publishing a book as absurd as Myth to Power was something like, “The intellectual radical Left makes a great deal of money publishing books that expound unclear, empirically inaccurate but on some level emotionally satisfying ideas, books in which the authors try to appear profound despite not really saying anything new or logical, so maybe we can do a ‘radical Right’ version of that.” (more…)
2,035 words
Bernd Schwipper
In Stalin’s Crosshairs: The Red Army’s Entry into the Second World War, and the Wehrmact’s Actions in 1941
Quaker Hill, PA: Antelope Hill Publishing, 2026
Operation Barbarossa was the massive attack by Nazi Germany upon the Soviet Union that started on June 22, 1941. When viewed through the commonly understood narrative of the pseudo-religion of World War II, Operation Barbarossa was an act of treachery and unprovoked aggression on the part of the Germans. The pseudo-religious narrative of the war also implies that the Soviets were innocently seeking to create a Workers’ Paradise on Earth before the Nazis invaded for no reason whatsoever. (more…)
1,080 words
Hamsun, Knut
Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn’s Papers
Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsen, 1894
In depicting a fictional world of blood and soil, Norwegian author Knut Hamsun is unsurpassed. We get a sense of this in his classic 1917 novel Growth of the Soil, which helped secure his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. In it we meet Isak of Sellanraa who builds a farm and a legacy out of the primeval Norwegian countryside. 1894’s Pan however takes man’s pre-modern, pantheistic relationship with nature to mystic heights and almost nightmarish depths. Nature is the novel—the plot, the prose, the main characters, the bells and whistles, everything. Pan not so much depicts this relationship as it embodies it. While Isak of Sellanraa farms—and subdues nature in the process—Thomas Glahn hunts and lives among nature. While Isak builds a family, Thomas survives alone. (more…)
3,085 words
Eugenia Cheng
How to Bake ϖ
Profile Books, 2015
Something about my own cognitive ability has always frustrated me. Well, being mediocre at chess after half a century playing the game frustrates me, but perhaps that failure to improve much is linked with my main irritation. I have a PhD and a very high IQ (tested and confirmed at ages 11 and 21), so why don’t I get maths, or “math,” as Americans prefer? (more…)
3,111 words
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. — Charles Baudelaire, epigraph to 2666
The British Prime Minister was asked during an interview to name his favorite novel, and the answer he gave was revealing. Sir Keir Starmer said he didn’t have a favorite novel. He didn’t have a favorite poem, either. This is a man who was the Director of Public Prosecutions, one of the highest appointments in the United Kingdom. I know that he had a good education because I was at school with him, although he evidently spent more time studying than I did. (more…)
1,835 words
Shyam Sankar & Madeline Hart
Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base & Stop World War III
New York: Bombardier Books, 2026
Sometime between the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill protest and the point in 2021 where Biden’s cognitive decline was obvious to all but American liberals, America lost her ability to deter, and hard knocks have followed. The best way to prevent a war going forward is to be so militarily strong that no one dares to carry out an attack in the first place. (more…)
2,498 word
There is quite a bit to recommend about E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India despite the fact that as a novel it is not very good. It keeps a lazy, middling pace throughout and seems to rely upon its post-First World War readership’s hunger for detail about everything Indian — from the landscape to the wildlife to the people and customs — for much of its appeal. If you’re already familiar with most of this — or if you just don’t care — then the plot and characters will make up for it, but just barely. It’s as if Forster found it distasteful to produce anything as vulgar as suspense — or, Heaven forfend, a cliffhanger. (more…)
3,914 words
Chris Jennings
End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2026
While the 24-hour news channels focused on Hurricane Andrew battering southern Florida in August of 1992, federal agents participated in a siege — or standoff, depending on your point of view — of the Weaver family’s residence. This happened because the family’s patriarch, Randy Weaver, had deliberately failed to show up for a court hearing related to a minor weapons violation. (more…)